April 16, 2018

Looking at the very first dialectical exercise in the Phenomenology, in the chapter on “sense certainty,” we find many leads for a Buddhist commentary on this great work. A thorough reflection on this scenario and its resonances with Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy would lay the ground for similar studies of other promising chapters in the Phenomenology, in a cumulative refocusing of Hegel’s achievement in a broader horizon. We already meet here the desire for immediacy and security that drives the reflection, and begin to see how the course of the reflection weans the mind away from clinging to illusory certitudes, in painful realization of constantly recurring dualisms until at last a final nondualistic position is established. The initial desire is changed as a result (in this case from empirical particularity to conceptual generality), as it will again and again be transformed and enriched until at last it finds the fulfillment commensurate with its authentic scope.

Sense-certainty is the most primitive and abstract form of knowledge, though it advances with the confidence of having immediately grasped reality in its fullness. Sense-certainty is induced to founder on its contradictions, and in the process pushes the mind to a higher and more sophisticated mode of knowing, namely perception. What exactly does Hegel mean by sense-certainty, and does his identification of it remain the same from beginning to end of the chapter dedicated to it? Is it changing shape in the course of the chapter? Well, in fact self-certainty is only a flimsy fiction, a mental construct, and Hegel tracks its phases skeptically. First is a dialectic of the sensible here and now, the immediate datum of awareness, the sense-data or brute particular, to which empiricists from Locke to Russell devoted so much attention. Then, when the contradictions of that kind of thinking are exposed refuge is taken in the subjective pole, the “I” of Cartesian fame, and this too is exposed as a flimsy fiction. Then sense-certainty as a whole, in a subject-object unity, becomes the focus; this in turn is brought to collapse and we move forward to a more promising scenario, that of “perception” and its object “the thing” and its attributes.

The consciousness of sense certainty is objectified and considered dispassionately and analytically much as in a Buddhist analysis:

Sense-certainty is correlated with the first category of the Logic, namely being or an indeterminate immediacy. But as a state of consciousness, or an imagined state of consciousness, it cannot be a pure concept like being, and will not recur as a fundamental reference in later stages. The concept of being in the Logic never involved the deluded sense that it already contained everything, whereas here self-certainty advances in utter delusion. The whole idea of establishing a point of departure for metaphysics dates from Descartes’s cogito, to which British empiricism opposes rival points of departure. The logical point of departure in the pure indeterminacy of being has a stability that the phenomenological point of departure in the construction of sense-certainty lacks. In Nāgārjuna there is no fixed point of departure, since any samsaric item can serve as an occasion to establish emptiness. Hegel needs to construct a system, albeit by means of negative dialectic, so he needs to establish his point of departure carefully. Nāgārjuna has no system-building ambition, but applies his dialectic to dismantling illusory hypostatizations that stand in the way of apprehending emptiness.

The deadpan language in which Hegel expounds the position of sense-certainty pretends to take it at face value as “immediate knowing, knowing of the immediate or being,” but readers alerted by the Logic will know that this language is an indicator of poverty; the immediacy of being is totally indeterminate, so that to know it is to know nothing. But sense-certainty has no suspicion of this inherent lack. Philosophy, it promises, begins with a perfect realization of nonduality: the world, being, is given in all its richness to the knower, in total immediacy and with total certitude. The philosopher may thus repose in beatific enjoyment of the here-and-now knowledge. The labor of the concept is something quite secondary to this immediate givenness of the thing itself, and indeed may seem a superfluous superstructure. There is a play of irony and humor in the way Hegel presents the successive stations of the mind’s odyssey, which he envisages or relives with warm empathy even as he is showing up their blind spots.

The extreme richness of the yield of this immediate knowledge does not threaten its nondual simplicity:

Der konkrete Inhalt der sinnlichen Gewißheit läßt sie unmittelbar als die reichste Erkenntnis, ja als eine Erkenntnis von unendlichem Reichtum erscheinen, für welchen ebensowohl wenn wir im Raume und in der Zeit, als worin er sich ausbreitet, hinaus-, als wenn wir uns ein Stück aus dieser Fülle nehmen, und durch Teilung in dasselbe hineingehen, keine Grenze zu finden ist. Sie erscheint außerdem als die wahrhafteste; denn sie hat von dem Gegenstande noch nichts weggelassen, sondern ihn in seiner ganzen Vollständigkeit vor sich. (The concrete content of sense-certainty lets it immediately appear as the richest knowledge, nay as a knowledge of infinite wealth, for which content no limit is to be found, just as much when we follow it out in its expansion in time and space as when we take a piece form this fulness and enter into it through division. It appears in addition as the most veridical knowledge, since it has not yet left out anything of the object but has it in its entirety before itself.) (69.10-19)

The logical correlative of sense-certainty is the category of being as a mere thereness, as an indeterminate immediacy which might just as well be called nothingness. Indeed it is not even a “thereness,” for the category is so abstract that “there’s no ‘there’ there,” whereas sense-certainty plumps itself in the here and now and claims to be thoroughly “there”; as does Descartes in the Cogito and as will phenomenology. For Husserl or Heidegger or Nishida this initial immediate sense of “being” might seem an ideal object of contemplation. Heidegger notes that “Being is for us the emptiest, most general, most understandable, most usable, most reliable, most forgotten, most said” (GA 6.2:227), while we are less attentive to the contraries of these qualities: being as the richest, as irreducibly singular, resistant to understanding, unthought in its arrival, abyssal, constantly recalled, silent about its essence. Our immediate understanding of being gives us plenty to think about. But for Hegel this immediate phenomenological level is not something worth lingering over; its apparent richness is illusory and its logical poverty must be laid bare:

Diese Gewißheit aber gibt in der Tat sich selbst für die abstrakteste und ärmsten Wahrheit aus. Sie sagt von dem, was sie weiß, nur dies aus: es ist; und ihre Wahrheit enthält allein das Sein der Sache; das Bewußtsein seinerseits ist in dieser Gewißheit nur als reines Ich; oder Ich bin darin nur als reiner Dieser, und der Gegenstand ebenso nur als reines Dieses. (This certainty shows itself in fact to be the poorest and most abstract truth. It says of what it knows only this: it is; and its truth contains only the being of the matter; consciousness on its part is in this certainty only as pure I; or I am therein only as pure this, and the object as well only as pure this.) (69.19-25)

How did Hegel reduce the richness of the deliveries of immediate knowing to the barren abstraction of being? The data are not reflected on and are not grasped in the complexity of their fabric, and neither is the consciousness apprehending them. The nonduality of this I’s rapturous reception of this datum is repeated ad nauseam for each datum in turn; “this” and “this” and “this" are simply given. Of both the subject and the object poles all that is said is that they are. A questioner of Hegel’s system might look critically at this initial step: unlike Husserl, Hegel has no sense of the richness of the “natural attitude” in its confidence encounter with experiential data (see Staiti 2008); instead he subjects its conceptual yield to a drastic critique, already prejudging that only conceptual thinking counts.

Nāgārjuna no doubt shares Hegel’s skepticism about immediate certitude. The solid assurance that “I am going there” is undercut by analysis of the “I,” of “going,” and of “there” (see MMK 2). All three turn out to be flimsy and inconsistent abstractions. But since any assertion lands one in contradictions, one cannot even assert mere “being.” Rather one is pushed back on a realization of the lack of substance of every notion on which one sought to prop oneself up. All one’s talk is unmasked as fabrication (prapañca), as mere convention (saṃvṛti-mātra). But where Hegel pulverizes one position so as to move forward to the next, in a movement of continuous enrichment, in Nāgārjuna the pulverized position in every case brings one face to face with the realization of emptiness. Though there is a certain progression in the targets of analysis, moving from the apparently concrete (“going”) to the avowedly abstract (“time”) and finally to the central teachings of Buddhism itself, there is no progressive dynamic of a Hegelian sort, only a constantly repeated rediscovery of emptiness. Dialectic is constructive and dynamic, progressive and cumulative, in Hegel, but even in Kant it is a rather static dismantling of illusions. For Kant the Enlightenment was about unmasking illusions that imprison the mind; for Hegel it was but one moment in a dynamic history that included the Revolution as well, and these breakthroughs made him think of history as progress of the mind and of freedom. This is the proximate matrix of the dialectic (as it is of the intense cultivation of “development” in Beethoven).

Note that already duality is rearing its ugly head; there is a fly in the amber of the pure initial nonduality; it was too good to be true. For now we have to deal with “I” and the “object,” two poles of the initial sense-certainty. Hegel will soon thematize this:

One who installs himself in the posture of declaring that being is and there is nothing beside it, in a radical Parmenidism, has to do violence to the mind and stifle its urge to question further. Likewise, one who basks in the wealth of immediate givenness has to forgo questioning that might reveal this wealth as fool’s gold. Both the I and its object are a pure mute isolated “this.” “This” itself is an empty transcendental concept, universally applicable. Rich mediation and differentiation is the mark of true knowledge for Hegel, and ultimately the isolated self is too abstract to be the bearer of such knowledge, which is rather generated in the collective life of the human spirit. Buddhist mindfulness, which focuses on the most limited phenomena perceived by the meditating individual, seems prima facie to be the polar opposite of this epistemology.

The Analytical Gaze

The analytical gaze of Hegel’s “us” (the observer in the double perspective introduced in the Einleitung and kept up throughout these early chapters) is focused on what is most immediately to hand; the observed likewise is an awareness of what is most immediately to hand. So we have an immediate awareness of an immediate awareness, the former critical and reflective, the latter naive and unreflecting. The analytical awareness has to restrict itself to mere attention to the observed. This is perhaps the most phenomenological moment of Hegel’s phenomenology, a moment of pure observing. The analytical gaze, too, may repose in beatific enjoyment of the immediacy of its knowledge. It takes stock approvingly of the achievement of senese-certainty and ratifies it.

Sense certainty appears as infinite both in macroscopic extent and in microscopic detail. Why does the critical gaze not subscribe to this confidence of immediate experience of having a full grasp of truth? Because it implicitly presupposes a wiser and more disillusioned awareness (it is already shaped by the whole process whereby the position of absolute knowing has been established), which cannot be taken in by any phenomenon presented to it, however vividly it may imagine and reconstruct the attraction of the position analyzed. In the present case, the object of its attention quickly reveals (at least to the observing gaze) how mistaken it was to characterize itself as a full grasp of concrete truth. Knowing only of things that they are, here and now, it may unwisely rest on the laurels of this first, indubitable, epistemic conquest. This puts Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, and Jacobi’s effort to recall philosophy to the registration of what is, firmly in their places. Would Heidegger’s “miracle of miracles, that beings are” (GA 9:307) equally be dismissed as an abstraction mistakenly taking itself for concrete knowledge? Heidegger’s phenomenology of the presence of being builds on a different kind of attending, that is closer to Zen than Hegel’s. “Intentionality” is the structure that mediates the self-manifestation of the phenomenon (see GA 20:34-63), and this is lucidly analyzed in phenomenological attention; sense-certainty is a more crude immediacy and its analysis dissolves it. Perhaps Hegel rejoins the sophistication of intentionality at a higher stage in this analysis, in the next chapter on Perception.

Mere attending, in Buddhism, has the effect of dismantling its object, causing it to show up its non-substantive character. Focusing on the object, in meditation, alters its status with no conceptual intervention. In the present case the apparent “infinite wealth” of sense certainty (“eine Erkenntnis von unendlichem Reichtum”) is a target for the reductive gaze that brings out the essential content of this knowledge, a content that turns out to be quite abstract and poor (like the correlative category of “being” at the logical level). Meditation similarly reduces the wealth of the busy world of our perception to a unitary datum, a simple given. The discussion as to whether the “pure experience” Nishida Kitaro talks about at the start of his early work A Study of the Good, should be thought of in terms of William James or of Zen finds its resolution here. For Nishida pure experience means to follow reality without the intrusion of any cogitation of one’s own “自己の細工を捨てて、事実に従うて知るのである” (Knowing means following reality, putting aside all artifices of self) (Nishida, 13), the reduction of everything to pure experience is a simplification and purification of perception, more Zen than Jamesian; or if the content of the experience is originally a Jamesian plethora the experience as brought into focus in its “purity” is a reduced “mere perception,” reduced both in the sense of depleted and in the sense of conducted back to its essential character. For Nishida at the level of pure or direct experience there is not as yet either a subject nor an object; whereas Hegel’s sense-certainty is characterized by a subject pole and an object pole, at first two mute “thises.” But just now the deliveries of immediate cognition seemed infinitely rich. It is the conceptual processing of them that is now the focus. Immediate cognition has no logos. Its only category is being, so it can only assert the being of its objects: this is, and that, and that. Thinking no doubt of Descartes, or at least of a cruder and simpler proto-Descartes, Hegel characterizes the subject as “I” and says it is a mere this, without further determination, and its object is a mere that, nothing more. Even if the object is infinitely rich, it is always apprehended only as a mere this, Both subject and object are isolated, atomistic individual entities, das Einzelne. Nishida’s pure experience does not posit anything like this, reflecting a Buddhist freedom from conceptions of the self as individual and its objects as individual things, conceptions that spontaneously impose themselves as as self-evident for Western philosophers.

Hegel’s analytical gaze zooms in on the logical structure of the phenomenon examined, much as Nāgārjuna’s does. It reduces the phenomenon to its logical essence and thus depletes it. The observing gaze allows the object to reveal its contradictions. Nāgārjuna, too, considers one object after the other, and his dialectic is the self-dismantling of the objects under his gaze. His text could be used as a textbook for meditation, again and again bringing into view the insubstantiality of dharmas, their emptiness. In Zen, the way to liberate thoughts is to let them liberate themselves (as Philippe Turenne remarks).

The analytical gaze in Hegel focuses on phenomena, on experience, and then allows the phenomena to exhibit their inner contradictions. Nāgārjuna is less phenomenological than this, for he seems to focus first on conceptuality, referring to experience only adventitiously. Chapter 1 for example, which is of foundational significance for the whole treatise, takes up concepts of causality, and declares in a tetralemma the logical impossibility of being caused from self, other, both, or neither.

(Never are any existing things found to originate from themselves, from something else, from both, or from no cause.) (MMK 1.1)

Some may say that this opening declaration is manifestly incorrect: causality is “from something else”—which is so obvious that no one in India even bothered to advert to and refute Nāgārjuna’s claim; likewise no one held the fourth position, of things arising causelessly (John Powers). But the key word in the sentence is bhāvāh. If bhāvāh really existed they could arise in one of these four ways, but since they don’t the four possibilities all fall equally flat. The “things” that arise in dependent co-origination have a much flimsier mode of existence than anything imagined to be posited by a causal power. In fact, this mode of existence is so flimsy that it self-deconstructs, so that in the ultimate analysis dependent co-origination is non-dependent non-origination. The four conditions discussed in this chapter: “There are four conditioning causes: A cause (hetu), objects of sensations (alambanam), ‘immediately preceding condition’ (anantaram), and of course the predominant influence (adhipateyam) — there is no fifth” (MMK 1.2), are not a purified Humean form of causation that avoids illicit ontological investments and so is perfectly valid (cf. Garfield); they, too, are shown to be ultimately untenable. It is as empty that conditions make up dependent origination, but because dependent origination is empty it can give rise to nothing really existing, and thus it is a non-origination.

(Certainly there is no self-existence of existing things in conditioning causes, etc; and if no self-existence exists, neither does “other-existence.”) (MMK 1.3)

Very little can stand up as ultimately valid under Nāgārjuna’s analytical gaze. Again, in MMK 2, the phenomenon of “going” is approached via a critique of the logic of our notions of going, goer, and stretch gone, which are again shown to be untenable. The analytical gaze focuses less on the experienced phenomenon than on the logical claims it entails, which are subejcted to reductio ad absurdum. Nāgārjuna is less phenomenological than Hegel in that he focuses directly on the logic of svabhavic claims rather than on their experiential basis; but Hegel’s phenomenology also quickly takes a logical turn. If one were to siphon out the strictly experiential matter in the Phenomenology of Spirit it might turn out to be quite scanty.

Ultimate unreality coexists with conventional reality is a paradoxical conjunction. The illusory nature of causality does not prevent the pain one feels when a stone drops on one’s foot, and the empty nature of arguments does not prevent a false thesis from collapsing when exposed to logical refutation. The functioning of dependent origination and of logical debate become in fact more efficacious when liberated from attachment to illusory foundations.

Duality Resurgent

So far Hegel has just insisted on the emptiness and poverty of the initial representation of knowing as a subject this immediately an object this. But soon duality will rear its ugly head, revealing that there was a fly in the ointment of this initial nonduality; it was too good to be true. The first duality is the realization that my sense-certainty is only an example of sense-certainty, doomed to be crowded out by many others even within my own proximate experience:

An dem reinen Sein aber, welches das Wesen dieser Gewißheit ausmacht, und welches sie als ihre Wahrheit aussagt, spielt, wenn wir zusehen, noch vieles andere beiher. Eine wirkliche sinnliche Gewißheit ist nicht nur diese reine Unmittelbarkeit, sondern ein Beispiel derselben. (In the pure being, however, which makes up the essence of this certainty, and which it utters as its truth, there is at play, when we look closely, still much more besides. An actual self-certainty is not only this pure immediacy, but an example of it.) (70.6-10)

This realization sets off a cascade of distinctions and differentiations that make the insistence on the simple “this” seem hopelessly inadequate:

Unter den unzähligen dabei vorkommenden Unterschieden finden wir allenthalben die Hauptverschiedenheit, daß nämlich in ihr sogleich aus dem reinen Sein die beiden schon genannten Diesen, ein Dieser als Ich, und ein Dieses als Gegenstand herausfallen. (Among the numberless distinctions coming with this we find everywhere the chief distinction, namely that in it immediately both the already named this-es, a this as I and a this as object fall out from pure being. (70.10-14)

Hegel picks out as particularly significant the duality of subject and object poles, which fall out of the initial unity and confront one another:

Reflektieren wir über diesen Unterschied, so ergibt sich, daß weder das eine noch das andere nur unmittelbar, in der sinnlichen Gewißheit ist, sondern zugleich als vermittelt; Ich habe die Gewißheit durch ein anderes, nämlich die Sache; und diese ist ebenso in der Gewißheit durch ein anderes, nämlich durch Ich. (If we reflect on this distinction, it transpires that neither the one nor the other is only immediately in sense-certainty, but also as mediated; I have certainty through another, namely the matter; and this likewise is in certainty through another, namely through I.) (70.14-20)

Neither of them are immediate givens any longer, but they are constituted through one another.

The essence of sense certainty is pure immediacy, but it is dualistically opposed to the variety of its instantiations, and to the mediations that insinuate itself into its fabric, notably that between “I” and “object.” It is the observing gaze that has noted this, pointing to it from outside. Now Hegel will show that sense-certainty itself stumbles on these dualities.

Diesen Unterschied des Wesens und des Beispiels, der Unmittelbarkeit und der Vermittlung, machen nicht nur wir, sondern wir finden ihn an der sinnlichen Gewißheit selbst; und in der Form, wie er an ihr ist, nicht wie wir ihn soeben bestimmten, ist er aufzunehmen. Es ist in ihr eines als das einfache unmittelbar seiende, oder als das Wesen gesetzt, der Gegenstand; das andere aber, als das unwesentliche und vermittelte, welches darin nicht an sich, sondern durch ein anderes ist, Ich, ein Wissen, das den Gegenstand nur darum weiß, weil er ist, und das sein oder auch nicht sein kann. Der Gegenstand aber ist, das Wahre und das Wesen; er ist, gleichgültig dagegen, ob er gewußt wird oder nicht; er bleibt, wenn er auch nicht gewußt wird; das Wissen aber ist nicht, wenn nicht der Gegenstand ist. (It is not only we [sc. the observing gaze] This distinction of the essence and the example, immediacy and mediation, but we find it [inscribed] in self-certainty itself; and it must be taken up in the form in which it is in self-certainty, not as we just determined it. In it there is posited the one, the simple immediate entity, or the essence, the object; but also the other, as the inessential and mediated with is therein not in itself but through another, I, a knowing, that knows the object only because it is, and can be or not be. The object however is, the true and the essence; it is, indifferently to whether it is known or not; it remains even when it is not known; but there isno knowing if there is no object.) (70.21-34)

Getting sense-certainty to explicate itself on its own terms, in contrast to what “we” have observed to far (but is the distinction between the two perspectives practicable?), we find that its first position is to posit the object as secure and lasting, while the subject’s awareness of it is secondary and temporary. Faced with a duality, one can overcome it by making one pole essential and immediate and the other inessential and mediated. Plumping for the object as the privileged pole we treat the subject as epiphenomenal. Sense-certainty does not know what it is doing as it shifts from one pole to the other, unwittingly manifesting the incoherence of its position.

Dialectic of Here and Now

Hegel then concentrates on a dialectical analysis of the object-pole:

Der Gegenstand ist also zu betrachten, ob er in der Tat, in der sinnlichen Gewißheit selbst, als solches Wesen ist, für welches er von ihr ausgegeben wird; ob dieser sein Begriff, Wesen zu sein, dem entspricht, wie er in ihr vorhanden ist. Wir haben zu dem Ende nicht über ihn zu reflektieren und nachzudenken, was er in Wahrheit sein möchte, sondern ihn nur zu betrachten, wie ihn die sinnliche Gewißheit an ihr hat. (The object is thus to be considered in regard to whether in fact it is as such essence in sense-certainty itself, which is what sense-certainty gave it out to be; whether this its concept, to be essence, corresponds to how it is present in sense-certainty. We need not reflect and consider to the end what it may be in truth, but only to contemplate it as sense-certainty has it in itself.) (70.35-71.2)

The claims of sense-certainty are examined exactly as they present themselves. Its claim to grasp the essence, the here and now, is allowed to speak for itself, and as it does so it collapses. The object is here and it is now. But when we focus on here and now they undergo an uncanny transformation; any concrete here or now turns out to be a wraith that we clutch at in vain. What abides in only an abstract form of hereness or nowness, which actually has a negative relationship to whatever concrete content may fill it out at any particular here or now.

The skeptical checking of the deliveries of sense-certainty is no doubt still being carried out from the standpoint of the observer, not produced by a cogitation immanent in sense-certainty itself, for if sense-certainty could grasp the logic of its own dead-ends it would not longer be mere sense-certainty. We need only consider the object as sense-certainty holds it, he says, but to instruct sense-certainty in critical awareness of its own limits one needs to be quite a sophisticated philosopher—more sophisticated than the philosophical defenders of sense-certainty who continue to speak of “raw feels” and other such inventions of the empiricist ideology:

Sie ist also selbst zu fragen: Was ist das Diese? Nehmen wir es in der gedoppelten Gestalt seines Seins, als das Itzt und als das Hier, so wird die Dialektik, die es an ihm hat, eine so verständliche Form erhalten, als es selbst ist. (So sense-certainty itself must be asked: What is the this? If we take it in the double shape of its being, as the now and the here, the dialectic that it has in itself will take a form just as understandable as it itself is. (71.3-7)

The dialectic will tumble from one contradiction to another, but this is because proclamations of the solid reality of a here or a now are intrinsically collapsing in their very utterance. Sense certainty is not a very coherent or intelligible position, so the dialectical demonstration of its contradictions necessitates a bit of rough pedagogical handling from outside:

This memorable graphic illustration might obscure the strict necessity of the transcendence of the particular here towards universal hereness. The here and now is mediated by the general: “Absent the mediation of the universal, it turns out that immediacy is like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there is no ‘there’ there” (Devries, 71); yet up to the end of this chapter “sense-certainty seeks to escape the mediation of the universal by simply ignoring it, by refusing to acknowledge that there are other nows and heres different from the particular immediacy of the moment” (72).

The dialectic is primitive because the primitivity of sense-certainty allows nothing more sophisticated. Sense-certainty is interrogated and is imagined to reply: “the now is night”; the passage of a few hours renders this assertion hollow. Affirming here and now reality as the all-sufficient bourne of thought, sense-certainty is easily discomfited.:

Das Itzt, welches Nacht ist, wird aufbewahrt, das heißt, es wird behandelt als das, für was es ausgegeben wird, als ein Seiendes; es erweist sich aber vielmehr als ein Nichtseiendes. (The now, which is night, is preserved, that is, it is handled as that which it is given out to be, as a being; it reveals itself however to be rather a non-being.) (71.15-18)

The logical correlative of this is that insistence on being, simply being, and nothing more, in its radical indeterminacy is indistinguishable from insistence on nothing. But this very “now” that is a nothing relative to the wished-for beingness of the concrete now, is a new reality with a logic of its own: it is a negative instance, a mediated instance, and it sustains itself and endures as such:

Das Itzt selbst erhält sich wohl, aber als ein solches, das nicht Nacht ist; ebenso erhält es sich gegen den Tag, der es itzt ist, als ein solches, das auch nicht Tag ist; oder als ein Negatives überhaupt. Dieses sich erhaltende Itzt ist daher nicht ein unmittelbares, sondern ein vermitteltes; denn es ist als ein bleibendes und sich erhaltendes dadurch bestimmt, daß anderes, nämlich der Tag und die Nacht, nicht ist. (The now sustains itself to be sure, but as a now that is not night; and equally it sustains itself against the day, that it now it, as a now that is also not day; or as a negative in general. This self-sustaining now is thus not immediate but mediated: for it is determined as abiding and self-sustaining through the fact that another, namely the day and the night, is not.)(71.18-24)

Have we then here a nondual and simple reality in which to repose? A fortress of simplicity that keeps the inessential complexities of different heres and nows at bay, maintaining a perfect indiffence over against them? Does the recourse to the general form of the now leave behind any intuition of the particular this, or does Hegel keep on to a thinking of the this in its irreducible particularity, in line with Wilfred Sellars’ claim that “intuitions would be representations of thises and would be conceptual in that peculiar way in which to represent something as a this is conceptual” (1967; quoted in Devries, 67)? For Hegel that “peculiar way” would be “to represent something immediately and as in direct relation to one but within a presupposed background scheme of classification that must itself be considered conceptual and general” (Devries, 73). Phenomenologists resists this pan-conceptualism, not to return to a mere positivism of sense data, but to grasp more integrally how experience is constituted. “Whereas Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic was limited to the a priori forms of space and time, Husserl expanded its field to include elements which, while not fully conceptual elements of the understanding, are also not merely the forms of intuition or the formless todder taken up in the manifold, but rather possessive of ‘a type of perceptual or aesthetic significance that Kant could only think of as “preconceptual” and therefore “precategorial”’” (Rump, 291, quoting Welton, 298). While early Buddhism tended to an atomistic, positivistic notion of sensory input and its intellectual ordering, Mahāyāna constitutes perception and conception more holistically, in the conviction of the emptiness of all sense data and the flimsiness of all conceptual constructs. Nāgārjuna thinks his way to the thusness of things through dialectical unmasking of their emptiness; sense-data offer no anchor, and conceptual frameworks collapse on their inherent contradictions, so that the apprehension of the real has to proceed by affirming the emptiness of its conventional webs, thus finding nirvanic breadth and calm amid the tangled webs of the samsaric world.

Dabei ist es eben noch so einfach als zuvor, Itzt, und in dieser Einfachheit gleichgültig gegen das, was noch bei ihm herspielt; so wenig die Nacht und der Tag sein Sein ist, ebensowohl ist es auch Tag und Nacht; es ist durch dies sein Anderssein gar nicht affiziert. Ein solches Einfaches, das durch Negation ist, weder dieses noch jenes, ein nicht dieses, und ebenso gleichgültig, auch dieses wie jenes zu sein, nennen wir ein Allgemeines; das Allgemeine ist also in der Tat das Wahre der sinnlichen Gewißheit. (It is still, just as simply as before, now, and in this simplicity indifferent toward what is otherwise in play with it; just as little as day or night is its being, so can it just as well also be day or night; it is not at all affected by this its otherness. Such a simple instance, which is through negation, neither this nor that, a not this, and equally indifferent to being this or being that, we call a general instance; the general is thus in effect the truth of sense-certainty.)(71.24-33)

The general is the effective truth of sense-certainty: this is a dialectical breakthrough to a new reality. Note that in Hegel, as in a different way in Heidegger, truth is not the truth-value of a proposition (mere correctness) but the full being or actuality of something. Perhaps for Buddhism too, truth refers to the true existence or thusness of things. All our spoken conventional truths fall short of that, and it is in silent contemplation that we can move in the direction of ultimate truth.

The movement from the initial here to the general form of the here might be described as a movement from being (Sein) to essence (Wesen). At the start of the second part of the Logic Hegel presents an integrated view of essence that contrasts with dualistic accounts of the relation of being and essence. Essence is defined as the truth of being (just as the general is the truth of sense-certainty); being is the immediate but essence denotes what being is “in and for itself.” “Erst indem das Wissen sich aus dem unmittelbaren Sein erinnert, durch diese Vermittlung finder es das Wesen” (1934:3). This is not a movement of knowledge that is external to being, but is “the movement of being itself”: “Es zeigte sich an diesem, dass es durch seine Natur sich erinnert und durch dies insichgehen zum Wesen wird” (3). I note that Hegel there says: “Das Erkennen kann überhaupt nicht bei dem mannigfaltigen Dasein, aber auch nicht bei dem Sein, dem reinen Sein, stehenbleiben” (Knowing cannot stay with multiple existence but neither can it stay with being, pure being) (3)—the richness and multiplicity of sense-certainty might have been handled with the category of Dasein rather than summarily placed under that of Sein; indeed Hegel’s treatment of that multiplicity may presuppose the movement described as follows: “Dieses reine Sein, die Negation alles Endlichen, eine Erinnerung und Bewegung voraussetzt, welche das unmittelbare Dasein zum reinen Sein gereinigt hat” (This pure being, the negation of everything finite, presupposes a recollection and movement that has purified immediate Dasein to pure being) (3). In calling the riches of sense-certainty mere being, Hegel already reduced it to its essence, as “die bestimmungslose, einfache Einheit, von der das Bestimmte auf eine äusserliche Weise hinweggenommen worden” (the simple unity without determination, from which the determined was taken away in an external manner) (4). But this reduction remains external and abstractive, and dualistic: “Das Wesen ist auf diese Weise nur Produkt, ein Gemachtes” (The essence is in this way only a product, something made) and the reflection producing it “hebt die Bestimmtheiten des Seins nur hinweg von dem, was als Wesen übrigbleibt” (takes the determination of being away from what remains over as essence); this essence is not in and for itself but exists only thanks to the abstracting reflection; it is “tote, leere Bestimmungslosigkeit” (dead, empty absence of determinations) (4).

This first breakthrough from the atomized here to the here as a general form echoes from afar similar effects in Buddhist analysis. The now is not any of its occasional contents; it is neither night nor day but merely a negative in general. Likewise for Nāgārjuna “going” is neither the goer nor its movement nor the path traversed; all are invalidated; yet going somehow goes on. It is not established as anything so solid as Hegel’s general, but rather as a conventional desitnation. Hegel’s general form of the now can remain and sustain itself only through the non-existence of night and day. In its simplicity it is indifferent to any particular concrete now. This emergence of the ultimate truth of the now has an affinity in its negative aspect with the emergence of the ultimate truth of going as mere convention. There is a kind of ultimacy in its emergence as autonomous over and against particular nows. It emerges as the revelation of their emptiness. The pure form of now is the truth of all particular nows, and it is a negative truth, undercutting the naive self-affirmation of the various nows. This dialectical breakthrough is tinged with ultimacy. But of course in the sliding-scale of Hegel’s dialectic, what appears as ultimate at one level of analysis is revealed as delusive at the next.

In pushing self-certainty to “despair” of sense objects Hegel’s dialectic provides a mild example of what Nāgārjuna does all the time. All the abstract figures of consciousness explored in the early chapters will come to a similar point of breakdown and make a similar leap to a new level of awareness, but the despair in each case is merely figurative, for the conceptions explored are only philosophical abstractions, not yet having the full weight of socially embodied spirit. Yet one could imagine someone clinging in fixation to some position in the dialectic and refusing to move on to the next stage. Such “unhappy consciousness” (to borrow the name of one position in this early abstract stage) could be the object of affective investment such that mere logic cannot overcome it, just as in Buddhism fixations and reifications are reinforced by affective clinging that makes them difficult to treat.

Hegel expounds the antinomies of sense-certainty in the manner of Pyrrhonian Scepticism. But whereas in Pyrrho, followed by Sextus Empiricus, this results in a suspension of judgment, Hegel can advance to a higher level thanks to the notion of “determinate negation” (bestimmte Negation) (see Düsing 1973:124). The present is neither day nor night nor both nor neither, but a higher and more general conception. Nāgārjuna is closer to ancient scepticism, for his deployment of the tetralemma disables any judgment one makes, and he does not seek higher, general structures, which he would see as a refuge of svabhāva thinking. Hegel finds that all speech implies the general, so that once sense-certainty seeks to articulate itself its atomistic particularity is dissolved in general conceptions of “now” and “here” and “I.” In antiquity this impossibility of speaking the unique particular was seen as a limit, forcing the speaker to resort to a mute pointing; for Hegel, it marks the graduation of thought to a new level of self-confidence, where it “makes things its own” and attains the level of general conceptions (Düsing 1973:127). Nāgārjuna applies his dialectic to general conceptions, too, but always in order to confute their validity. The general is not closer to the true than the empirical particular, but false in a subtler way. An empiricist faith that the entire immediate relation of sense object to sense perception constitutes the true is undercut in Nāgārjuna by the demonstration that neither object nor perception can have any stable identity. Hegel again shows that such a faith cannot stand up or be confirmed on its own terms but must be translated into general conceptions of both poles. Both thinkers overcome the cult of immediacy often espoused by modern empiricists or phenomenologists and also attributed to Zen.

“We perhaps do not yet know what Hegel’s dialectical sublation really is, or what negativity is: to learn it one must plunge into one’s heart, and that heart is likely to be, if I dare say so, a Christian heart” (Jean-Luc Nancy). Of course in his lectures on the philosophy of religion (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) Hegel’s machinery of negation and sublation meets the Christian dialectic of death and resurrection; but Nancy must mean that even in the Phenomenology (1807) and the Logic (1812, 1816) the conceptual play has a Christian matrix. The entire movement of these works from abstract to concrete, and in a progress to ever higher levels of integration and autonomy, could have an affinity with Christian schemas of fulfillment and of incarnation. While dialectic has abundant Greek sources, the dynamic and dramatic character of Hegelian dialectic may owe something to Luther and, behind him, to St. Paul. And the primacy of spirit over an external world in Augustinian Christianity provides a historical matrix for Hegel’s effort to realize the promise of Reason’s conviction “that all actuality is nothing other than itself” (132.35-6).

This idealism, the radical conversion of “substance” into “subject,” is not only Christian, but could be correlated with Buddhism too. Remembering that Hegel lived in the period of the Oriental Renaissance, and busied himself with Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in his philosophy of religion and in a remarkable fifty-page essay on the Bhagavad-gītā (1826; text in Rathore/Mohapatra, 87-139), we would not be doing violence to him in tracing affinities and possible interactions between the negative methods of his thought (notably in the central part of the Logic, which powerfully deconstructs one basic metaphysical concept after another) and the negative prowess of Buddhism (notably in the dialectic of emptiness in Madhyamaka thought). Indeed there are some remarks on Buddhism is the Logic itself, but they consign it to a primitive stage in logical development and see it as having “nothingness” rather than “being” as its supreme principle; Hegel knew nothing of the logical refinements of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. Another affinity between Hegelianism and Buddhism is the presupposition that humans are caught in a condition of alienation and must think their way out of it (see Moyar 3008); that is a Christian and Augustinian theme too, but to take stock of its systematically and work on it diligently, using its own resources to overcome it (as in the Buddhist slogan that “passions themselves are enlightenment”), is a strategy that brings Hegel into closer proximity to Buddhism.

However, Nancy’s question about “what Hegel’s dialectical sublation really is” may be misleading, since Hegel’s dialectical demonstrations explain themselves, always in function of a particular situation. The Greek Skeptics and the Kant of the antinomies(Critique of Pure Reason B 448-595) would have given Hegel an idea of dialectic, and he found that he had a great skill in handling it. This dialectical enthusiasm that keeps the march of rational insight going, in the Phenemenology and the Logic, does not require reference to any extra-philosophical matrix. To grasp its orientation and purpose do we need to “plunge into our heart”? I would say rather that we should attune to the underlying conatus of the entire sweep of the dialectic. We may call this a kind of philosophical eros, an intense search for an intellectual goal that Hegel envisages quite clearly from the start.

The first ripe presentation of that achieved goal is found in the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “absolute knowing.” This final vantage is marked by freedom: Hegel and Schelling, inspired by the French Revolution, devoted themselves to the conquest of freedom in the realm of thought; ultimate reality was to be defined primarily as freedom rather than as mind or as being. Secondly, the final position dissolves the reifications and dualisms that clog the advance of mind; it attains a fully integrated vision marked by nonduality, or a new simplicity (see Cattin). Hegel saw the whole modern world as suffering from painful dualisms: between transcendent God and created world, subject and object, ideal and reality, and his path to overcoming these is through entering deeply into them and explicating their logic. Thirdly, the negative work of the dialectic yields to a negation of the negation, whereby being, reality, immediacy are restored; all the substantial categories that have been overcome are sublated into the life of the subject, of spirit. The subject pole has developed to the powerful integrative knowing of the Concept, and this embraces and penetrates its object pole. With the complete integration of the subject and object poles, of the concept and its content, in realized autonomy and self-sufficiency, dualisms are finally dissolved, and thought may proceed with sovereign demystified confidence.

The restoration of being in a transfigured light in the third part of the Logic resonates remotely with the Christian model of resurrection, but it can also connect with the positive goals of Buddhist reflection, resonating with the Buddhist attainments of release, thusness (tathatā), nonduality. While the mode of progress is rigorously conceptual, it would be wrong to underestimate the role of a certain contemplative intuition. Hegel’s penetrating wisdom is sustained and guided by a spiritual instinct that merits close critical assessment from a Buddhist angle. Such a Buddhist reading would also study the development of Hegel’s quest of nonduality from its origins in the early enthusiasm shared with his fellow-students Schelling and Hölderlin. In the process it could enable a deeper Western philosophical grasp of what Buddhists means by their often puzzling talk of nonduality. The double benefit of comparative philosophy may thus be most fully realized if we do not shy away from a full-scale confrontation of Hegel and the most powerful Buddhist thinkers.

Nonduality and Recurrent Dualities

Since Hegel’s thought issues not in emptiness but in a restoration of being that has integrated all negations, it might seem that there is no promising interaction between the final parts of Hegel’s constructions and Buddhism. Žižek notes that, in comparison with “what is erroneously called ‘Buddhist ontology’” (108), “not even Hegel’s dialectics seems radical enough: for him, Being still has primacy over Nothing, negativity is still limited to self-mediating movement of the Absolute Spirit, which thus maintains a minimum of substantial identity.” However, Žižek notes the special nature of “the properly Hegelian dialectical process, in which negativity is not reduced to a self-mediation of the positive Absolute but, on the contrary, positive reality arises as a result of the self-relational negativity” (149). We might say that being is born of nothingness in Hegel’s thought. On the way to generating positive reality the dialectic undergoes many dramatic crises, not only in the historico-social parts of the Phenomenology but also in the Logic of Essence (or logic of reflection, the central section of the Science of Logic). Each successive positive synthesis is menaced by the original nothingness, into which it may collapse again.

I would add that each successive synthesis is a moment of reconciliation, of unity, and even of nonduality, in which a painful dualism is dissolved; and that the emergence of new dualisms within that momentarily achieved unity is what pushes the dialectic forward again. The dialectic comes to a close only with a fully achieved integration within which no new disruptive dualism can emerge. The utopian sounding pages at the end of the Phenomenology and the Logic celebrate the conquest of intellectual freedom, no longer shackled by painful unresolved dualisms. Thought has reached its full stature as the Concept or the Idea, and has fully integrated its content, fully abreast with the real. Such thought interprets the world, rather than changing it. Yet to release thought into its full capacities is already a contribution to change and liberation. Some will say that this is the feeblest dimension of his thought, and that his dialectic is much more vital and dynamic in its critical, deconstructive, negative deployment. (Some such as Cyril O’Regan and Terry Pinkard argue that Hegel’s dialectic remains an open project that does not reach final closure. That reading should open up Hegel still more for dialogal interaction.)

Hegel’s persistent desire to overcome dualism and the freedom of the final position of integration and simplicity he finally reaches (or at least envisages) might enable us to understand the Buddhist yearning for nonduality. “Yearning” is not an inapposite word here, if the underlying motivation of the dialectic is a philosophical eros in the tradition of Plato, Plotinus, or Spinoza. In Buddhism, desire or craving is what entangles one in delusive reification, cementing the illusion of svabhāva (substantial identity), but a more wholesome aspiration spurs one to dissolve the bonds, purposefully attacking and dismantling the illusion. Enslaving desire is hooked on dualities, but a higher desire for nonduality pushes the mind to defuse these dualities. The path to nonduality and freedom in both thinkers is one that traverses the illusions of svabhāva, in a graded training in emptiness. In Hegel this creates a cumulative progression in insight, which keeps us at every stage from slipping back to inferior categories that are unworthy of what is to be thought. Nāgārjuna, in contrast, seems to tackle one false claimant to svabhāva after another, without a clear cumulative progress; but it might be possible to construct some kind of progress, even if only of a narrative or situational kind, in the sequence of the twenty-seven chapters of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), or Root Stanzas of the Middle Way, Nāgārjuna’s foundational verse treatise (for the text see Siderits/Katsura).

Hegel’s aim, like the Buddha’s, is happiness: “Every philosophy sets forth nothing else but the construction of highest bliss as idea” (Faith and Knowledge, cited, Stewart, 18). Stewart identifies the components of Hegelian happiness as agreement with our community, knowledge of truth, and radical freedom (20). But there is also a spiritual thirst for presence and simplicity, a thirst to rest in divine infinity. Such religious longing underpins even the first part of the phenomenology, originally to be titled Science of the Experience of Consciousness. The deadlocks the mind meets on its progress are spiritual crises: the despair and doubt of Skepticism, the false approach to nirvanic ultimacy in “the unhappy consciousness.” Each stage grasps the unconditioned, though that grasp is in each case undermined by a dualism, implying contradiction, that it harbors. When reason finally becomes one with its content in objective knowing, and thus prepared to discern and expound the structure of reality in the sciences of logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit, it already enjoys a freedom and autonomy that it cannot thereafter lose. The crises the later chapters chronicle are crises of collective consciousness, crises of culture, but at the level of individual consciousness, the situation reached at the end of Chapter Five marks a definitive breakthrough. In Buddhist terms, one might say that the would-be enlightener of humanity has already attained a sufficient grounding in Wisdom at this point, and that the later chapters launch him or her into the wider adventure of Compassion, penetrating the ups and downs of human history so as to guide it to universal reason, absolute knowledge, pervading all spheres of human endeavor.

However even this mature scientific reason is still a long way from the absolute knowing to be reached at the end of the Phenomenology. Reason still belongs among “possible models of cognizing and acting subjectivity, or putative candidates for such a status which, as quite fragmented, partial, and so distorted ‘shapes’ of a possibly experiencing subject, can not actually stand as models of experience at all”; the actual phenomelogy of spirit “only truly begins in Chapter VI” where fully-fledged figures of historical humanity emerge (Pippin, 215). A Buddhist reading of the work’s first five chapters deals with cognitive structures but not with the whole living human being. But perhaps much Buddhist analysis has a similar abstraction and partiality; or at least there may be one level in Buddhist analysis that corresponds in its abstraction to what Hegel sketches in the Ur-phenomenology. Yogācāra philosophy of mind aims at a “transformation of the basis” (āśraya-paravṛtti) that is a thorough ontological conversion of humans in the depth of their being, “a conversion of consciousness from the imagined pattern of truth-clinging to the perfected pattern of reaffirmed other-dependent understanding” (Keenan, 58). Madhyamaka does not embark on anything so concrete and richly existential, which makes it a suitable interpreting text for the Ur-phenomenology.]

Comparative Dialectics

Approaching Madhyamaka from a Hegelian angle, what grips our thought is not its positive teaching on the emptiness of all dharmas, the illusoriness of all svabhāva, which Nāgārjuna inherited from the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, nor is it its contemplative depth nor its salvific promise as it holds out the simplicity of nirvāṇa as a goal beyond all conceptual efforts. What holds vital interest for a Hegelian is the argumentative prowess of Nāgārjuna, the dialectical machinery whereby he demonstrates the emptiness of all would-be substances and identities. This dialectic is more than logic-chopping. Like Hegel’s, it aims to free the mind of rigid, uncriticized concepts. Each chapter of the MMK exposes entrenched thinking to a series of shocks and encourages its replacement by a more flexible manner of thinking. Some postmodern readers may view this dialectic as just a game, a skillful means for prompting contemplative awakening, with no validity in itself (see Huntington 1989; O’Leary 2010). But a Hegelian will take seriously the labor of the concept, which, though it belongs to the register of conventional truth, not ultimate truth, adheres to the most rigorous logical criteria, and cannot be dismissed as merely a flimsy ludic technique for prompting a leap from reason to intuition. Rather than pouncing on apparent weaknesses in Nāgārjuna’s logic to argue that it is not real logic at all, the Hegelian will fill out Nāgārjuna’s argumentation to bring out its logical force and coherence.

The laconic nature of Nāgārjuna’s writing is not due to a logical deficiency but to a concern that the form of his presentation would accord with its content. Like Hegel, Nāgārjuna had little time for prefatory explanation (“unpassend und zweckwidrig,” says Hegel, in his… Preface [1988:9.9]) but wanted to expound truth in its own terms, in the precise cut and thrust of dialectic. The viewpoints of opponents are reduced to their precise logical content, and the refutation exhibits some aspect of the logic of emptiness. There is a teleology in both Hegel and Nāgārjuna: the ideal of the Concept, the freedom of “absolute knowing,” inspires Hegel’s dialectic, but does not dictate its effects in any given case; insight into emptiness is Nāgārjuna’s guiding thread, but it does not dictate how the sword or scalpel of emptiness will cut in any given argument. Hegel never met anything that could not be integrated by the Concept and Nāgārjuna never met anything whose emptiness could not be demonstrated. This confirmed for both that their dialectic was in tune with the fabric of the real.

How could one challenge such a performance? One can do so effectively only at the local level, challenging the logic of the arguments one at a time, In both cases one faces peculiar difficulties in doing so, for the authors set the rules of their own logic, and even when one manages to reconstruct its progress it is very difficult to establish a vantage-point from which it might be criticized (on the Hegelian case, see Henrich 1971:73-84). In attempting local critiques one meets recurrent—and recursive—stuctures of argument, and these can be the target of a more general critique. I shall not make any particular attempt to criticize the methods of argument on either side, but only to explore how they interact in affinity and difference, and how the Eastern dialectic can bring the Western one into new focus and vice versa. The point and purpose of each dialectic may be clarified and saved from irrelevance when opened out beyond its own echo-chamber. But are there concrete questions in terms of which the two logics can come into mutual interaction? If we take a general topic like causality for example, the arguments on both sides are applied at a very late stage in a long history of reflection on causality, and when we try to reconstitute that history, we may find that what the two traditions are talking about is so different in each case that such a global term as “causality” may not be able to bring both of them together on a level plane or in a shared space.

Negative Dialectic

Hegel “belongs to a long line of thinkers—beginning, perhaps, with the historical Parmenides, running through Sextus Empiricus, and including in our own century the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus—who have thought that the argument which discredits the received views of things and leads to the correct philosophical standpoint ends by discrediting itself as well” (Forster, 284). In Buddhism one casts aside the raft that has served as a skillful means, once it has safely ferried one to the other shore, and Nāgārjuna sees his arguments as fighting poison with poison, perfectly disposable when they’ve done their job. Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung has a similar character. The entire argument of the Phenomenology is sublated (abolished, but preserved in a radically modified form) when the scientific standpoint is established in “absolute knowing.” Within each part of the Hegelian system we see earlier stages vanish into the higher: the logic of being is consumed in the negative logic of reflection and this in turn is negated in the logic of the Concept, where both being and reflection are subsumed into a larger whole. As in some strands of Buddhism there is a “sliding scale” (see Dunne, 53-79) in which what appears as definitive at one level turns out to be merely provisional at the next.In Hegel’s Logic of Reflection, being, which appeared to be given immediately, is revealed as posited by the negative movement of reflection, and to subsist only as show (Schein). Show is “being only as moment, or being affected by nothingness.… Show is a nothingness—not a reality on its own, but only the illusion of being” (DiGiovanni, 146). Reflection nihilates the initial positing of being, reduces being to a moment within a movement from nothing to nothing. This stage in Hegel’s logic can be read as a critical exposition of the status of phenomena in Greek skepticism and in the idealism of Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte. It is surpassed in the final stage of the Science of Logic. But even there, in the dynamic structure of the Concept, being continues to be penetrated by the negative movement of thought: “The essence is the first negation of being, which thereby has become show; the Concept is the second, or the negation of this negation, thus re-established being, but as its infinite mediation and negativity in itself” (Das Wesen ist die erste Negation des Seins, das dadurch zum Schein geworden ist; der Begriff ist die zweite oder die Negation dieser Negation, also das wiederhergestellte Sein, aber als die unendliche Vermittlung und Negativität desselben in sich selbst) (1934:235). This all-pervading movement of negation is the oxygen of Hegel’s thought, ensuring that it remains an enactment of intellectual freedom; whenever he stops short at some positive, unreflected assertion, his thought dies; it lives only by pulverizing purportedly solid points of departure and by rendering purportedly clear goals elusive and fluid, thus remaining a movement from no-thing to no-thing.

The purely negative dialectic of Madhyamaka Buddhism, which issues in emptiness, can solicit Hegelian thought to new horizons, to a “letting-go” wherein it fully accepts its own fragile and provisional status. The MMK, by dint of dialectical quizzing and reductiones ad absurdum, bring all claimants to substantial identity (svabhāva, “own-being”) to confess their self-contradictory and ultimately empty nature. Thus every clinging to them is cut off at the root and the mind is released from bondage to rigid, uncriticized concepts. Could a Hegelian dialectic, hospitable to the power of the negative, take this in its stride as well? Or is reason shown up as merely a strategy for regulating truths of a conventional, world-ensconced, provisional order, its highest role being to allow ultimate emptiness show through the web of conventionalities—an emptiness on which reason has no grip? If reason succumbs to such a radical crisis, this could paradoxically constitute a triumph of reflection; speculation is thwarted but judgment thrives. Integral rationality, Hegel would agree, is that which recognizes its weakness and does not lean with illicit certainty on any of the theses or presuppositions with which it finds itself provisionally furnished. But more than that, it renounces all illicit groping after system, completion, absoluteness, wherein its weaknesses would be eliminated. Speculative ambition cedes to espousal of the wisdom of emptiness. The deconstructive movement of reflection realizes that it can never go back, never heal the wound it has opened. Analysis shows every proposition to have but a fragile and provisional validity. Hegel might object that it cannot do this except in light of some ultimate yardstick. Nāgārjuna would say that no such yardstick is given. In Hegel the power of the negative generates from the collapse of one set of assertions a new and richer set to replace them, but for Nāgārjuna a non-implicative negation (prasajya-pratiṣedha) prevails, which dismantles various illusory objects of mental attachment but asserts nothing. (David Loy would speak of ulimate groundlessness: “The bad news is: there is not parachute; the good news is: there is no ground.”)

If we wager that Nāgārjuna’s dialectic of emptiness can prise the Hegelian system open, instead of being reabsorbed into it, this need not entail that Hegel’s thought is vain and delusive. Emptiness, which a Chinese adage calls “a fasting of the mind,” does not end thought but redirects it. Nāgārjuna and his followers constantly generate subtle arguments in the service of emptiness, and many of these have affinities with the negative aspects of Hegel’s thought. Unlike Kant, who proves contradictories, and who does not put in question the categories of substance, space, or time that they presuppose, albeit giving them a transcendental interpretation, Hegel is more radical, and admits no givens that cannot be explicated and surpassed in logical terms. Nāgārjuna, too, would say that neither of Kant’s contradictory theses can be established, for the categories of time, space, self, are inconsistent, and this inconsistency can be resolved only by recognizing their emptiness of substantial identity. The same is true of all other phenomena. Even the Tathāgata is empty of identity, neither eternal, nor non-eternal, nor both, nor neither; neither having an end, nor not having an end, nor both, nor neither (see MMK 22.12). This negative procedure may seem to repeat over and over again the thesis that all dharmas are empty, discouraging differentiated thought about the various levels of reality and of conceptuality. But each class of dharmas offers a different handle for the negating analysis, and the ultimate sameness of all dharmas insofar as they are empty does not exclude a great variety of strategies to be employed as the mind gently leads each kind of dharma back to the quiet of ultimate reality.

In Madhyamaka dialectic, in contrast to Hegel, “the real is attained by the negation of views not their addition” (Murti, 303). But if the Science of Logic is read as dissolving traditional metaphysics, by expounding its categories in critical dialectic, then the role of negation in his thought brings Hegel into proximity with Buddhism. If Hegelian dialectic is read as concerned not with establishing correct positions but with freeing the mind from bondage to fixed mindsets, it comes close to a Buddhist sense of conceptuality as functional and conventional. If one carries further Hegel’s critical activity of putting a halt to reifying fabrications, it opens onto emptiness, and can expand and enrich Madhyamaka insight into the fragile conventionality of all categories and propositions. (Admittedly, I am soliciting Hegel in the direction of the negative, following Theunissen’s reading, of which not all Hegelians approve.)

Buddhist emptiness accepts the nothingness at work in the heart of being, and thereby discovers that in their very fragility and mutual dependency phenomena become the vehicles of a new freedom. If we think of conventional or “screening” reality, saṃvṛti, as inessential appearances over against the essential reality of emptiness, we miss a more intimate mutual co-implication of conventional and ultimate, wherein to see the conventional as conventional is already to see its ultimate emptiness. The wisdom of emptiness arises from reflection on the conventional; it is that reflection itself; or it is the conventional’s self-reflection. The empty “thusness” that survives the ordeal of the negative cannot be the self-satisfied re-assertion of delusive svabhāva. Rather, it is being that is totally identified with emptiness or that has become a moment of emptiness. “Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself is form” (Heart Sūtra). We know emptiness only as embodied in dependently originating phenomena, and we know these in their thusness only when we grasp them as self-negating or self-deconstructing, thus confessing their own emptiness. Deepening this insight, one discovers that the frail world of saṃsāra, the realm of pain and impermanence, is not different from nirvāṇa, the realm of blissful emptiness. That was Nāgārjuna’s culminating insight: “There is no distinction whatsoever between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. There is no distinction whatsoever between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. What is the limit of nirvāṇa, that is the limit of saṃsāra. There is not even the finest gap to be found between the two” (MMK 25.19-20). The discovery of emptiness is itself blissful nirvāṇa, the quiescence of all grasping and all conceptual fabrications (25.24). Even ordinary everyday life can be the locus for nirvāṇa, and even a nirvanized person can continue to live everyday life, using it as a convention to lead others compassionately to ultimate reality. A retrieval of all Hegel’s arguments in this key would give a new lease of life to his thought.

The many superimposed layers of Hegel’s argumentation and the way in which the solution reached at a given level is relativized and overcome at the next, higher level, recall similar structures in Madhyamaka, such as the rather schematic arrangement in Tibetan debates where what appears as ultimate truth in one of the lower schools (Vaibhāśika, Sautrāntika, or Yogācāra), is seen as merely conventional in a higher school, with Madhyamaka as the highest. Original ignorance (avidyā) generates a cascade of false conceptions, amid which we live, and without which ordinary life would become impossible. Madhyamaka distinguishes ever subtler forms of delusion, both in metaphysical ratiocination and in an underlying subconscious investment in mental habits and presuppositions, cemented by tenacious clinging. Hegel arranges the categories that seek to name the true nature of reality from the simplest to the fullest. Each of them (being, Dasein, essence, identity, ground, existence, power, actuality, absolute, substance, necessity, cause, concept, judgment, conclusion, objectivity, life, teleology, knowing) reveals its limit through its inner contradictions, until in the end the absolute idea emerges as the complete, integral actualization of logical truth. This process should not be seen as a purely positive accumulation. Rather, the labor of dialectic is negative, working not in the direction of ever richer substantiality, but in that of subjectivity and freedom. The categories become lighter and more alive and take the form of an open movement of relating rather than a closed self-sufficient solidity. To each category corresponds an idea of God, from the primitive level of “God is being” or “God is the essence” up to the richly reflected content of “God is idea” or “God is life.”

Hegel’s logic enacts “the activity of the determinations of thought” and shows how in their dialectical movement they “investigate themselves” and “exhibit their lack” (quoted, Theunissen 1980:15). Previous metaphysics, composed from these determinations of thought, is put in movement and overcome. Nāgārjuna does the same for Buddhist conceptions. His critique has two phases that might roughly correspond to Hegel’s logic of being and logic of essence. In the first phase he tackles hypostasized notions of simple independent realities such as “time” as a unitary substance or power, or “past,” “present,” and “future” as independent realities. This can be compared with Hegel’s “critique of an ontology that asserts only beings and indeed beings in themselves” (Theunissen 1980:25). In a second phase the mutual relationship of the three dimensions of time brings a reflected apprehension of time. Temporal concepts have meaning only in relation to another, be it the alleged temporally existing thing or other temporal dimensions. In reflection each temporal dimension is successively the dominant one. Present and future exist only in dependence on past, and thus have no real existence. The same holds for the other two permutations. The three relations of dominance between the temporal dimensions subvert one another. The same logic applies to triads such as “above, middle, below” and to dyads such as “one, many” (MMK 19.4). Similar arguments are used for the relations of seer, seen, and sight (MMK 3), an element and its defining characteristic (MMK 5), desirer and desire (MMK 6), fire and fuel (MMK 10). Reciprocal relationships betoken the nonexistence of the relata.

In a logic of reflection somewhat reminiscent of Hegel’s all these categories are conceived in purely relative terms. But in a further movement of critical analysis these relative determinations are themselves unmasked as svabhāva and their reciprocal dependence is problematized. If two of these moments already exist in the third (or in the case of a dyad, if one already exists in the other), they lose their own identity (versus the Sāmkhya sat-kārya-vāda, the claim that the effect is pre-formed in the cause). If they do not already exist therein, how can they depend on it? (versus the Vaiśeṣika asat-kārya-vāda). Relativity must be thought through to the end, so that every claimed identity of the relata vanishes, and what remains is only a play between conventional designations. Similarly, in Hegel, “the logic of essence unmasks the metaphysical categories as products of the reflecting understanding, which, as we have heard, ‘posits’ the ‘relativity’ of the distinctions. It is to that extent untouched by the critique of indifference in the logic of being, for to the contrary the positing of relativity removes the foreignness in which the relata stand over against each other as long as, on the basis of the assumption of their subsisting for themselves, their reciprocal relation appears as external to themselves” (Theunissen 1980:26).

A Commentary Project

To set up a practicable interplay between Nāgārjuna and Hegel, the method of a commentary is promising, in that we take as a target text one that is already well-known and much commented on (the first five chapters of the Phenomenology) and that therefore provides a secure point of reference, preventing digression into unverifiable or sweeping comparative doxography. Our task is simply to shed more light on Hegel’s text with whatever resources Nāgārjuna’s offers. A Hegelian commentary on Nāgārjuna’s text could complement this. But of course in commenting on the Phenomenology in light of the MMK we are implicitly commenting on the latter as well, for we are sighting the parts of it that are most relevant to Hegel’s text at each phase. If the relevance turns out to be really vital, and to permit penetration of Hegel’s text from a new angle, then this gives a foothold for deeper understanding of Nāgārjuna as well, the sense that, “Ah, this is what he is talking about!” Then the emergent differences or limits on either side will be clearly located as well, which cannot but be instructive.

The very limited textual basis for the Nāgārjuna material—the eschewal of the whole reach of Buddhism, or of Madhyamaka, or even of Nāgārjuna’s own oeuvre (which has many texts of uncertain authenticity or extant only in Tibetan translation—problems that we are spared from having to deal with)—is a salutary limit to the commentarial exercise, ensuring that its yield is clear. Choosing one relatively brief but undeniably central Buddhist text and using it as a key to “unlock” another relatively brief but undeniably central Western text, we should be able to stage a combat at close quarters between the two mental worlds. Of course the commentary will be informed by the fullestpossible background knowledge of both texts, but not to the detriment of the narrow textual focus chosen. Every theme touched on has been the object of endless, complex debate in both East and West. Both texts have been commented on from a great variety of philosophical angles. For instance Nāgārjuna’s overcoming of Abhidharma substantialism and atomism has been compared with Wittgenstein’s polemic against Russell (Gudmunsen 1977), and philosophers such as Peter Strawson are invoked to clarify Nāgārjuna’s argumentation (Streng, 139-42). Only by confining itself rigorously to the two texts can the commentary establish a secure bridge between the two worlds of thought; a more global approach would quickly lapse into the doxographic and unverifiable.

A choice of theme will help prompt and steer the commentary and prevent it from falling into desultory dispersal. In our commentary on the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa (O’Leary 2017) in light of the New Testament we took nonduality as the theme, since it is clearly central to the Buddhist text and since it guided us to the most relevant New Testament texts. In the present case “dialectics” is obviously central in both texts, but we need to identify also a topic or topics on which the two different dialectical ways of thinking come into some kind of convergence. Like a gold prospector we review various promising issues. First are those that arise from the practice of dialectic itself such as the subtle interplay between affirmation and negation, or the relationship between logic and experience or the phenomenal: how does the immanent development of the dialectic square with the opening to experiential data? Then come those that arise from the objects or situations to which the dialectic is successively applied: the correlation between subjectivity and its objects in each of these situations might be analyzed in Buddhist terms. The ontology of being and nothingness could be a theme for interaction: immediacy, being, presence, are pulverized in both dialectics, yet are in some sense restored, even in Nāgārjuna, who admits the ultimacy of nirvāṇa as well as the continuing conventional validity of what is ultimately undercut.

Provisionally, I would pick as guiding theme “the power of the negative.” The point of maximum intersection between Hegel and Buddhism is the role negation plays in his thought. For Hegel every state of consciousness and every thing is the negation of itself; “existence is thus in itself a ‘negation’” (Henrich 1978:216). Negation in Hegel is plural, and in one form or another negation is what gives birth to every philosophical idea (213-14). Do we find the same flexible plurality in Nāgārjuna’s use of negation or can it be reduced to a unitary system? It can be asked if Hegel’s Scienceof Logic is primarily exposition (Darstellung) or critique or if the two procedures are equally basic (Theunissen 1980a:213); a reading that sees in it above all a critique, or that would solicit it in this direction in view of a Buddhist sublation of Hegel’s thought, could enable a reciprocal illumination of Hegel and Nāgārjuna. Hegel affirms the constructive function of negation, in contradiction with its use in Madhyamaka. It is through negative work on the determinations of thought (the Denkbestimmungen) that a free thinking emerges at last, which is called the Concept or the Idea. For Madhyamaka all thinking belongs to the conventional level, and the ultimate is presented as dissolution of conceptual distinctions. Without seeking to erase this point of divergence, we could take Hegel’s dialectic as a construction of conventional truth, which thanks to the role of negation in it is closer than any other Western system to the Buddhist vision of conceptuality. Common presentations of Hegel as a dogmatist and system-builder miss the teeming life of negation in the texture of his writing, which is held in check only by a strenuous exercise of “negation of the negation,” whose ultimate victory is ill-assured.

My commentary will confine itself to the work that Hegel originally intended, and which ended with the fifth chapter, “Reason,” from which there was an easy transition to the Logic, as has been shown by Forster (505-10). This offersa manageable basis for comparison with Buddhist dialectic, again tidily represented by the MMK, the best known Buddhist philosophical text. The “science of the experience of consciousness” (a title that covers the first five chapters of the Phenomenology) is a very manageable corner of Hegel’s system. The object of investigation is far more easily grasped than the very abstract themes of the Logic, and it has not expanded to the vast range of concrete phenomena subsumed under the categories of Spirit. We must admire Hegel’s prowess in thinking out the logic of the relations between abstract determinations of thought (Denkbestimmungen) and his equal prowess in wrestling with the realities of society, history, culture, and religion, thinking dialectically all the time. But for the present we meet him on a middle ground where he is dealing with a concrete object, consciousness, but not with its full overwhelming concreteness as enacted in society and history.

I think these remain nagging questions for most of us, which is why we can identify so easily with “Doubting Thomas.” We have heard of the Resurrection, but we cannot see it. What justifies us in believing in it?

The author of the Fourth Gospel, writing perhaps sixty or seventy years after the event, was well aware of this situation, and he surely expected his readers to identify with Thomas, as in previous chapters they will have identified with other interlocutors of Jesus: Nathanael, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the paralyzed man at the pool, the man born blind, Martha and Mary, for example.Several of these figures began in a dark place and ended up joyfully expressing faith in Jesus as the Messiah. That is also the trajectory followed by Thomas in today’s Gospel. Indeed it is he who utters the most impressive and most complete words of faith in the whole Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” As we meditate on this Gospel we put ourselves in Thomas’s shoes, sharing his confusion and doubt, and we are led by him to a new encounter with Christ, now glorified by the Father.

2. To doubt is a sign of honesty, of a willingness to inquire and to listen in the search for truth. Faith is a virtue but credulity or gullibility is not. A mature believer will often reassess his or her faith, weeding out what is based on fancy or superstition, and adhering all the more to what is based on reliable perception of reality.

So Thomas is right to check the other apostles’ story. But he does bluster a bit, and perhaps in addition to being an honest inquiring man he is also affected by a negative spirit of skepticism, or of unbelief. When Jesus says to him, “do not be unbelieving” the meaning probably is “ask your questions and doubt what seemsunworthy of belief, but don’t indulge in a negativity that rules out any perception of divine and spiritual realities from the start. Questioning is good, and leads to truth, but sometimes questioning becomes negative and obsessive and does not expect to find any answer — it becomes a form of resistance to encountering truth.”

3. This scene is not the first time Thomas has spoken in the Gospel. We met Thomas on two previous occasions. In the other Gospels all we learn about Thomas is his name as one of the Twelve.

In the conversation that Jesus has with his disciples before going to visit Lazarus, in Bethany near Jerusalem, Jesus says: “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him." Then Thomas (called Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:14-16).

Here Thomas is seen as a person of total and devoted faith. He knows how dangerous it is to go to Jerusalem, where Jesus is already a marked man, and where the authorities are plotting to kill him. But he want to follow Jesus wherever Jesus goes, in a total identification with Jesus that may have something to do with his nickname “the twin.” He wants to be near Jesus in life and death, and perhaps that is part of what is expressed in his desire to touch Jesus’ risen body. At the very beginning of Jesus’s journey to his death, Thomas leaps forward and promises to die with him.

4. Thomas shows his questioning mind on his second appearance, in John 14:-4-7. “‘And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Thomas knows more than he thinks he knows. He asks blunt and literal-minded questions, but he really already knows Jesus as the way, having lived with him and followed him so faithfully. Knowing Jesus he knows the Father to whom Jesus leads. In a sense he has “seen” the Father, inasmuch as such a thing is possible in this life. “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18).

5. When Jesus says to Thomas in today’s Gospel: “You believe because you have seen me; blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe,” he may be saying: “Thomas, you know me, and you have “seen” the Father by following me in faith, Now again you meet me and in me you meet the Father whom you cannot see. I understand your doubt about the message of the resurrection, but remember the path you have folllowed with me, how you have known me and through me how you have known the Father. I am the same Jesus in whose sufferings you shared; these wounds in my hands and side show that. But now I have entered into the glory to which the path you followed with me leads. Believe in me now, risen and glorious, as you believed in me on our hard journey to Jerusalem and on the evening before my passion and death.”

6. “My Lord and my God” is the climax of the series of confessions of Christ in ths Gospel. It may mean: “My Lord who leads me to the Father, and my God, the Father. I recognize you as my risen Lord and in you I meet also the Father, for to see you is to see the Father.” Tor the Greek here uses the expression “ho Theos” which otherwise occurred only at the start of the Gospel, where it referred to the Father: “the Word was with God (= ho Theos) and the Word was God (= theos, without the definite article). Jesus in his divine nature is God from God, and God toward God. He is true God, but he has his divinity from the Father, and his entire path is one of return to the Father. In this sense “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). He catches us up in this movement and leads us too to the joy of communion with the Father and the Son.

We could say that the risen Jesus is the full visible manifestation of the invisible God. Of course, unlike Thomas, we do not have a vision of the risen Christ. But we do know Jesus and can follow him on his way to the Father — we know Jesus by faith, by listening to his words, meeting him in the sacraments, and recognizing him in our neighbour. He is the way, and his resurrection shows the glorious destination to which that way leads.

7. “Blessed are those who have not seen but yet believe.” Why are they blessed? Not just because of their conviction about a hidden future, but because they know Christ in secure daily faith, following him as the Way. And as they follow him, practicing the works of love in a community of love, such as the first and second readings depict, they are more and more conscious of the presence of God in Christ and in their own life, and they grow in confidence that this way on which they are being led with their fellow-Christians is a way to life and glory.

Safe in the Hands of the Divine Shepherd

1. “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.”

Can we hear this message and can we make these words our own?

Very many people suffer from anxiety, a crippling condition of deep unease, that can veer into depression and suicidal moods. Traumatic scenes from their past are played over and over again in their minds, and cannot be shaken off.

We might tell such people, “Just trust in the Lord and let yourself be carried by the Good Shepherd.”

But tragically the source of their anxiety is often connected with religion, so that such a message is the last thing they want to hear. I think of the many LGBT people who have been deeply wounded by religious teaching on three fronts: injured in their relation to themselves, hating their sexual orientation or gender identification, and lacking all self-confidence; injured in their relation to their families, with whom they are unable to communicate openly, or who, if they do communicate with them, will react with a failure of understanding and sympathy; and injured in their relationship to their faith-ommunity, where they rightly or wrongly feel unwelcome or out of place, and which does not think to provide them with a space for open disussion where they can feel safe and accepted.

For such reasons many who are a prey to anxiety also feel abandoned or forgotten by God.

2. But even the average person who is not exposed to such traumatic matters may have difficulty hearing the message that the Lord is their shepherd. Isn’t it the kind of thing you read on kitschy holy pictures, not having much bearing on real life?

Our lives seem to be so shaped that we have the greatest difficulty orienting them to God in trustful abandonment. We have plans and ambitions, or distracting duties that keep us busy. Habitual stress or moroseness curbs any elan of the spirit. And a sense of irremediable sinfulness keeps us from “lifting up our eyes to the hills, from whence comes our help” (Ps. 121:1).

But as the Irish proverb says, “the help of God is nearer than the door.” All that is needed is to stop and to listen. Listen to some word of Scripture, some familiar prayer or hymn, or just attend to the silent presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament.“Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints, to those who turn to him in their heart” (Ps. 85:8)..

No matter where we are, we can open our inward ear to this voice that speaks of peace.

3. “Your sins are forgiven” (Mk 2:5 and Lk 7:48) is the first message that this gracious voice speaks to the anxious mind. To embrace this message that sets us right with God is the first blessing of religion. Our sinfulness does not disqualify us from hearing it, for it is intended as a balm to the inner wounds our sins have inflicted on us. God speaks this word most powerfully in Christ, who took our sins on himself, and who “was raised to life for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Hearing the Risen Christ speak the words, “Peace be unto you” (Jn 20:19), we are able to rest confidently in the calm assurance he breathes upon us.

Holding onto this, as steadily as we are able, we find the anchor of our being, at a level deeper than all invasion of anxiety, worry, depression, or fear.

4. The divine Shepherd makes us feel safe, held in his palm. This will elicit from us a response of joy and gratitude, as the chains that bind our minds are unloosed and we place ourselves utterly in God’s hands. This loving surrender to God is not servitude but perfect freedom.

Then his sanctifying grace can move us to generous thoughts and good works. The Shepherd grants security, but also leads us to new pastures, spurring us to creative ventures we did not dream of when imprisoned in the cage of our anxiety.

Even if we fail to follow him and stray from the upward path, we are still in his hands, since we can always turn again to him and confide ourselves to his safe keeping.

Four times in today’s Gospel (Jn 10:11-18) we hear the voice of Christ telliing us that he lays down his life for his sheep. This is the most powerful, the most incarnate, expression of that divine reassurance that anxious minds need to hear. It reminds us of the strength of the bond that ties us to Christ, a bond as close as the one that binds a mother to her child.

“You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you” (Isaiah 43:4). That is what the divine voice says to us if we open our ear to it. Those are words everyone longs to hear, and words the bring deep joy and security to the heart.

If we are privileged to hear these words, let us also share them with others, and become ambassadors of Christ’s peace to them.

November 15, 2017

Some of James’s short stories or ‘tales’ can seem hollow and strained, their characters thinly sketched and their plot stretched to the limits of plausibility, though of course the novella as a genre is expected to be a striking sketch and not to rival the rich and complex texture of a novel. Yet close reading, or re-reading, of James’s tales may uncover a lode of human interest or psychological subtlety that goes beyond ingenious anecdote. I believe that this is particularly true of the neglected ‘Paste,’ published in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 49, in December 1899. In order to pay for Lamb House, his elegant residence in Rye, James turned out story after story that year, for a while at the rate of one a week (at fifty pounds per story). He had enrolled in the literary ‘stable’ of a skilful agent, James B. Pinker, and rejoiced in what he called ‘the germs of a new career’ as Pinker placed his work (Edel, 319). This commercial and popular context of publication has perhaps discouraged serious attention to the tale.

James comments on ‘Paste’ as follows:

The origin of ‘Paste’ is rather more expressible [than that of ‘The Great Good Place’], since it was to consist but of the ingenious thought of transposing the terms of one of Guy de Maupassant’s admirable contes [‘La Parure’]… It seemed harmless sport simply to turn that situation round – to shift, in other words, the ground of the horrid mistake, making this a matter not of a false treasure supposed to be true and precious, but of a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow: though a new little ‘drama,’ a new setting for my pearls – and as different as possible from the other – had of course withal to be found. (NYE 16:x)

James’s deprecatory language (‘ingenious thought,’ ‘harmless sport’) further encourages critics to treat the story as a light diversion; compare his dismissal of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ as ‘rather a shameless pot-boiler’ (James 1984:88). He seems to have forgotten that Maupassant himself wrote exactly such an inversion of the 1884 story ‘La Parure’ (Maupassant, 1198-1206) in another story, ‘Les Bijoux’ (764-71); or rather (as neither Tintner nor Gale note), the former story is an inversion of the latter, published a year earlier, in 1883. ‘Les Bijoux’ has more in common with ‘Paste’ than ‘La Parure’ has. It was inspired by an anecdote reported in Le Voleur in 1870, about a ministry employee who discovers the true value of his wife’s jewels and clothes after her death, and realizes she was the Minister’s ‘charmeuse’ (Maupassant, 1520). Adeline Tintner points out echoes of ‘Les Bijoux’ which show that James had it in mind when composing ‘Paste.’ There is a parallel between the husband’s initial denial and Arthur Prime’s denial, and ‘the theater and the jewels are united in both tales’ (1987:232).

James nonetheless understates his own claim to originality and wittingly or unwittingly causes critics to treat his story as mere ‘paste’ or pastiche, though in reality it is ‘a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow.’ Rewriting Maupassant was a serious creative endeavour for James: ‘Invention was for him the transposing, rearranging, reassessing, and recycling of an idea which he had seen unsatisfactorily or incompletely realized in another writer, or realized in a way not to his taste’ (Tintner 1987:230-1). The difference between the two stories lies deeper than the trick of the inversion. Somerset Maugham, in a simpler style, similarly used pearl riddles as a framework for studying psychological interactions in ‘Mr Know-all’ and ‘A String of Beads’ (Maugham 317-22, 412-17).

Placed in a context of popular entertainment, like so many of Maupassant’s stories, the tale nonetheless deserves the closest attention, given that it lies amid a string of masterpieces in which epistemological problems turn around sexual relations, being preceded by What Maisie Knew (1897), ‘In the Cage’ (1898), ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), The Awkward Age (1899), and followed by The Sacred Fount (written in 1900) and The Ambassadors (written in 1900-01). James, no doubt thinking of ‘Paste,’ uses the image of pearls in reference to the epistemology of the first two of these works: ‘The range of wonderment attributed in our tale [‘In the Cage’] to the young woman employed at Cocker’s differs little in essence from the speculative thread on which the pearls of Maisie’s experience… – pearls of so strange an iridiscence – are mostly strung’ (NYE 11:xx). There characters weave their complex ‘knowledge’ just as an oyster secretes a pearl. The narrator of The Sacred Fount speaks at one point of saving ‘my precious pearl of an inquiry’ (James 2006:179, which echoes Charlotte’s loss of both the precious pearls and her moral and epistemological bearings in ‘Paste.’ The Sacred Fount drew from Rebecca West the caustic description: ‘A week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows’ (Edel 1953:vii). This is unfair, for apart from the interest of the theme of sexual vampirism with which James was obsessed (ib., xxxvii-ix), the incertitudes of the narrator espouse very closely those that pervade everyday life, and that fill many a diary, especially in uncertain adolescence. The application of Kantian epistemology to the puzzles of the everyday is not beneath the dignity of a novelist.

The few comments I have found on the tale are marred by inaccuracies. Jamesians have done a poor job of defending the story against dismissive comments such as an early reviewer’s ‘rather trifling, with interesting psychology but difficult reading’ (cited, Taylor, 289) or the disgruntled reactions rife on the internet, from those who bridle at the high-class connotations of James’s elegant dialogue, being ill-attuned to its musicality, and who rehearse the old objection: ‘Why can’t he tell a simple story in a simple way, like Maupassant?’

The ‘cleverly packed’ tale (Tintner 1987:232) has a life of its own, exceeding its rather trivial occasion. Rather like the eponymous pearls, it acquires a warm, erotic inner glow with successive readings, and the lustre or polish of its style is more and more appreciated. In this it is an apt tribute to Maupassant, whose art can seem cheap, yet often sounds human nature with startling insight. James consciously raises the stylistic level of the story beyond what Maupassant would have aimed at, as part of the treatment he gives ‘my pearls’ (though as Tintner notes Maupassant wrote about diamonds, not pearls).

James does lodge another claim to originality, which makes ‘Paste’ more than a jeu d’esprit and commends it to critical attention, namely, the creation of ‘a new little “drama”… as different as possible’ from Maupassant’s. The story is indeed a drama, the sequence of its four sections resembling a ‘well-made play’ in its use of the knacks James acquired in the theatrical career that had ended ingloriously four years earlier. The timing and rhythm of the dialogue, and the precisely noted accompanying movements, would make the story worthy of the stage, though in practice the refined wit and reflective integration of Jamesian dialogue made it unstageworthy. The little drama is one of seduction, contrasting one woman who is an expert seducer with another who has no mastery of the art of seduction. Their dealings with the seductive pearls highlight this contrast.

Told from the point of view of the younger woman, a penniless governess, the story takes the form of a sequence of dialogues. In the first and third sections, Charlotte talks with her stuffy cousin Arthur Prime, whose name suggests primitive bluntness, primness, his role as primal man in her life and as the only man in the story, his relation to her as first (Ital. primo cousin). Communication between the two is inflected and hampered by her timid, muffled attraction to him. In the second and fourth sections, her interlocutor is the sexually knowing, predatory, somewhat masculine Mrs Guy (her androgynous name another allusion to Guy de Maupassant), whose passion is as overwhelming to Charlotte as her cousin’s coldness. Note, as a mark of dramatic economy, that there are no other speakers in the story than the three principals.

In this essay I shall quote the entire story in the text of the New York Edition, printing it in bold type for the reader’s convenience. When I have broken up one of James’s paragraphs I resume without an indentation. I note the few changes from the 1900 Methuen edition, as published in The Library of America, by placing this text within square brackets, in normal print. James enriched the vocabulary and phrasing here and there, but some changes are not for the better, and the omission of a considerable number of commas spoils the rhythm of several sentences and causes the narrative to lose relief. I do not reproduce the New York Edition’s strange and distracting practice of writing ‘isn’t,’ ‘wasn’t,’ ‘doesn’t,’ ‘didn’t,’ ‘haven’t,’ ‘hadn’t,’ ‘mightn’t,’ ‘couldn’t,’ and ‘shouldn’t’ as ‘is n’t,’ ‘was n’t,’ ‘does n’t,’ ‘did n’t,’ ‘have n’t,’ ‘had n’t,’ ‘might n’t,’ ‘could n’t,’ and ‘should n’t.’

I. Charlotte and Arthur after the Funeral

(315) ‘I’ve found a lot more things,’ her cousin said to her the day after the second funeral; ‘they’re up in her room – but they’re things I wish you’d look at.’

This incipit is characteristic of James’s deft narrative style. Though he does not seem to have known Chekhov’s stories, he follows Chekhov’s advice that in writing a short story one should leave out the beginning and leave out the end. Plunged in medias res we hear of two unnamed women, of a mysterious second funeral, and above all of the ‘things’ and their special relationship to the woman addressed. Questions spring up, tantalizing the readers’ curiosity and obliging us to read on for the answers. It is not even clear whether the speaker is male or female. The immediate reference to funerals casts a shadow of death over the tale, which will deal with buried jewellery, both genuine and fake, representing a buried past and a buried passion, but also with a triumphant resurrection, a return of that erased past in a new key. The opening foregrounds the twice-mentioned ‘things,’ as yet completely unidentified, and launches the fascination with their mystery which is the unifying motif of the entire story.

The pair of mourners, sufficiently stricken, were in the garden of the vicarage together, before luncheon, waiting to be summoned to that meal, and Arthur Prime had still in his face the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression, of feeling something or other. Some such appearance was in itself of course natural within a week of his stepmother’s death, within three of his father’s; but what was most present to the girl, herself sensitive and shrewd, was that he seemed somehow to brood without sorrow, to suffer without what she in her own case would have called pain.

The questions raised in the first paragraph are resolved one by one in the second. The ‘cousin’ is named as Arthur Prime, the deceased is his stepmother, the first funeral was that of his father the vicar.

Readers of the story are likely to think of Charlotte as dim-witted and gullible, but James goes out of the way (almost to the point of committing what his compositional principles would deem an illegitimate authorial intervention) to underline her sensitivity and shrewdness. She can assess the genuineness of her cousin’s mourning, detect that it is mere ‘paste.’ The diction itself mischievously reproduces the feel of fake pearls – ‘something or other. Some such appearance.’

The story turns on questions of appearance and reality, and its title refers not only to the fake jewellery (to which there is no further reference once the real pearls are identified less than half way through the story) but to the human pretences of the characters – the pompous respectability cultivated by Arthur, the scheming of Mrs Guy, the lies both tell Charlotte, and the secretiveness of the dead aunt and the starchiness of her married life. The distinctions Charlotte makes: ‘the intention, she was moved to call it rather than the expression’ and ‘to suffer without what she in her own case would have called pain,’ show not only a discriminating consciousness about human feelings, but also a judicious sensitivity to words (‘intention’ rather than ‘expression,’ ‘suffering’ rather than ‘pain’); the discrimination is not made from the outside but implicates the observer (‘she was moved to call it’; ‘what she in her own case would have called’). Charlotte’s own grief does not seem very deep either; both are ‘sufficiently stricken’ – bringing just the right amount of sadness to the occasion.

He turned away from her after this last speech – it was a good deal his habit to drop an observation and leave her to pick it up without assistance. If the vicar’s widow, now in her turn finally translated, had not really belonged to him it was not for want of her giving herself, so far as he ever would take her; and she had lain for three days all alone at the end of the passage, in the great cold chamber of hospitality, the dampish[,] greenish room where visitors slept and where several of the ladies of the parish had, without effect, offered, in pairs and successions, piously to watch with her. His personal connexion [connection] with the parish was now slighter (316) than ever, and he had really not waited for this opportunity to show the ladies what he thought of them.

Arthur’s stepmother had failed to ‘seduce’ him, and his response to her death is cold. He comes across as a cold fish, distinctly misogynistic – as shown in his boorish snubbing of his stepmother, the well-meaning parish ladies, and Charlotte herself. Charlotte’s attraction to him is not warm passion either but a pathetic neediness, of the sort exhibited by Miss Tita in ‘The Aspern Papers’ and the fearful governess of ‘The Turn of the Screw.’ Not passion, but perhaps a longing for domestic security, is Charlotte’s motive. Her needy attachment to Arthur is an important element in the tale, which the critics seem to overlook.

She felt that she herself had, during her doleful month’s leave from Bleet, where she was governess, rather taken her place in the same snubbed order; but it was presently, none the less, with a better little hope of coming in for some remembrance, some relic, that she went up to look at the things he had spoken of, the identity of which, as a confused cluster of bright objects on a table in the darkened room, shimmered at her as soon as she had opened the door.

Being a governess is a doleful job enough, as the sad name ‘Bleet’ suggests, but Charlotte’s leave has been even more doleful, because of the two funerals (probably the occasion of her leave) and the unfriendliness of her cousin. The ‘better little hope’ is an obscure comparative, indicating perhaps that part of Arthur’s snubbing has consisted in making no mention of any bequest to her from her aunt, no offer of any memento. It is only the newly discovered ‘things’ that he thinks suitable for Charlotte’s attention, not because he sees her as a fine connoisseur of jewellery, but because her need of a memento can be neatly met by the vulgar and valueless objects, which he wants to dispose of quickly.

The jewels seem actively to declare their identity – which ‘shimmers at her’ – and they appear as if staged in an artful setting – ‘bright objects on a table in the darkened room,’ the personal room of the dead woman. They are already exerting their seduction on Charlotte, even before she finds the genuine pearls concealed among them. (O’Leary 2008 mistakenly identified the jewels and the pearls.) James’s pearls and even his stage jewels are a richer presence than Maupassant’s, which are sparse props, described in plain language.

They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment, before touching them, she knew them as things of the theatre, as very much too fine to have been[,] with any verisimilitude[,] things of the vicarage. They were too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had no jewels to speak of, and these were coronets and girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if[,] after the first queer shock of them[,] she found herself taking them up[,] it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her, of a far-off faded story.

She instantly discerns the identity of the things as theatrical trappings, again showing her sensitivity and shrewdness. They strike her as uncanny, communicating a ‘queer shock.’ From the start the jewels have a vivid life (and still more the pearls hidden among them). They are more than a Hitchcockian McGuffin. One thinks of the Socratic agalma, which the beloved possesses and which is the object of longing (Lacan 1991:163-78).

The ‘things’ have the character of a fetish, with the characteristic double aspect of something holy and venerable (the pearls) and something tawdry, obscene, idolatrous (the trash amid which the pearls are hidden). Psychoanalysts are fascinated with the fetishistic effect whereby a common thing is transformed into a sacral Thing. A postage stamp has a useful function in everyday life, but we are scarcely conscious of it as a thing in its own right. But in the philatelist's collection it shines as a precious Thing. The things are carefully ‘handled’ and the movements of those holding them are charted in detail. People hesitate to touch them, as if they were holy, dangerous, or polluting. Compare Densher’s handling of Milly’s posthumous letter at the end of The Wings of the Dove (O’Leary 1999-2001:64-79).

The financial musings on their value bring out another aspect, commodity fetishism, which can be applied to commodified human beings such as Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl). But commercialization has not made the pearls a fetish, rather it desacralizes them. The pearls are an intimate witness of human love and passion, and to commercialize them is to betray this human value. A fetish can lose its value, as in the case of Christina Light in Roderick Hudson, treated as a fetish by her mother: ‘The poor old fetish had been so caressed and manipulated, so thrust in and out of its niche, so passed from hand to hand, so dressed and undressed, so mumbled and fumbled over, that it had lost by this time much of its early freshness, and seemed a rather battered and disfeatured divinity’ (NYE 1:249). However, the pearls are never devalued in our story; their long burial has rather kept them fresh and they come gloriously into their own when disinterred.

We note that what most thrills Charlotte about the jewels is what would have most thrilled James: their evocation of ‘a far-off faded story.’ Things that tell stories, or around which stories are woven, loom large in Jamesian fiction: the protagonist’s rare masterworks in Roderick Hudson, the ‘papers’ in ‘The Aspern Papers,’ the eponymous things in The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. Note how James plays with idioms – ‘too good to be true’ becomes ‘too dreadfully good to be true,’ with a serious accent on the ‘dread’ – and how smoothly the idioms subserve the thematic web of the novella.

An honest widowed cleric with a small son and a large sense of Shakespeare [Shakspeare] had, on a brave latitude of habit as well as of taste – since it implied his having in very fact dropped deep into the ‘pit’ – conceived for an obscure actress[,] several years older than himself[,] an admiration of which the prompt offer of his reverend name and hortatory hand was the sufficiently candid sign. The response had perhaps[,] in those dim years, so far as eccentricity was concerned [in the way of eccentricity], even bettered the proposal, and Charlotte, turning the tale over, had (317) long since drawn from it a measure of the career renounced by the undistinguished comédienne [comédienne] – doubtless also tragic, or perhaps pantomimic, at a pinch – of her late uncle’s dreams. This career couldn’t [could not] have been eminent and must much more probably have been comfortless.

In a second phase of response, Charlotte senses that the jewels bring to life her aunt’s disowned past, and even her uncle’s descent into the ‘pit’ – not of the theatre only, but of hell it seems. It speaks of a quaint, far-off, faded, buried past, and the true pearls, when they come to light, will speak of that past more intimately, until it becomes ‘a palpable imaginable visitable past’ (NYE 12:x). The jewels tell of a vulgar, social, theatrical past; the pearls will tell of an individual, private, refined, and truly passionate one. These variants of the magic of resurrection enrich the role of both the true and the false jewels as dramatic agents in the story. At first they have the quiet dignity of ‘relics’ or ‘survivals,’ but as the tale progresses they take on increasingly vital qualities, seducing the three protagonists one by one.

Notice the elegant humour of the diction: ‘the prompt offer of his reverend name and hortatory hand.’ The actress is older than the vicar, leaving space for a long pre-history that only now comes to light. The details necessary for the narrative about her aunt’s past are cleverly presented in the perspective of Charlotte’s memory and reconstruction. At no point does the tale need to step outside the present moment to fill in background. Exemplifying James’s ‘scenic principle’ at its most effective, it contains no sentence that does not contribute to its drama and psychological life.

‘You see what it is – old stuff of the time she never liked to mention.’

Our young woman gave a start; her companion had[,] after all[,] rejoined her and had apparently watched a moment her slightly scared recognition.

The encounter with the jewels inspires a touch of religious awe – she is ‘slightly scared’ and the intrusion of a watching Arthur on this sacred moment could be a kind of violation. His entire attitude of the jewels aims to desacralize them.

‘So I said to myself,’ she replied. Then[,] to show intelligence, yet keep clear of twaddle: ‘How peculiar they look!’

‘They look awful,’ said Arthur Prime. ‘Cheap gilt, diamonds as big as potatoes. These are trappings of a ruder age than ours. Actors do themselves better now.’

‘Oh now,’ said Charlotte, not to be less knowing, ‘actresses have real diamonds.’

‘Some of them.’ Arthur spoke dryly [drily].

‘I mean the bad ones – the nobodies too.’

‘Oh[,] some of the nobodies have the biggest. But mamma wasn’t of that sort.’

‘A nobody?’ Charlotte risked.

‘Not a nobody to whom somebody – well, not a nobody with diamonds. It isn’t all worth, this trash, five pounds.’

The dialogue in this story is marked to a great degree by one of the speakers completing the other’s sentences or taking up some phrase the other has used. Edel (1953:x) writes of The Sacred Fount: ‘The eager narrator, with that exasperating habit certain of James’s characters have of butting in, finishes the sentence for her.’ But this habit seems to be shared by all the characters in both stories. It creates an effect of mobile perceptions and a certain musicality. Consider the play on the word ‘nobody’ here, which resonates as a musical motif.

Arthur seems not to have noticed the genuine pearl necklace among the stage jewellery. It is the latter that arouses his worry. His discourse throughout the story is in the register of denial. He brushes aside any unwelcome implications in a bullying way. There is comedy in the way he shows his worry about his stepmother’s respectability in the interrupted phrase, ‘not a nobody to whom somebody’ – the continuation: ‘would give real diamonds,’ with all its sexual implications, is suppressed. Arthur claims knowledge of the theatre and Charlotte, anxious ‘to show intelligence,’ wants to appear equally ‘knowing’ – another word with sexual overtones. ‘Actresses have real diamonds’ is one of her unfortunate remarks, with unintentional reference to the sexual lives of actresses. When she qualifies it as referring to ‘the bad ones’ and to ‘nobodies,’ she again touches a nerve: the stepmother had been an undistinguished artist, a nobody, so a gift of diamonds to her would be doubly suspicious.

The jewels ‘speak’ to Charlotte, winning her over; but they do not yet speak of passion and love, as the pearls will.

There was something in the old gewgaws that spoke to her, and she continued to turn them over. ‘They’re relics. I think they have their melancholy and even their dignity.’

They already had the function of relics for the dead aunt, a solace in memory in her dull marriage, and now they are doubly relics, of the aunt’s youth in the tawdry world of the stage, quaint in long retrospect, and of her older life as respected matron. The word ‘relics’ confers on all these connotations a sacral quality.

Their melancholy dignity leaves Arthur untouched:

Arthur observed another pause. ‘Do you care (318) for them?’ he then asked. ‘I mean,’ he promptly added, ‘as a souvenir.’

‘Of you?’ Charlotte threw off.

‘Of me? What have I to do with it? Of your poor dead aunt who was so kind to you,’ he said with virtuous sternness.

‘Well, I’d [I would] rather have them than nothing.’

‘Then please take them,’ he returned in a tone of relief which expressed somehow more of the eager than of the gracious.

Charlotte’s interest in Arthur produces comedy here, as she complete his sentence with the ‘of you’ which he takes up only to rebuff. She wants a souvenir of him rather than of the dead woman, and he rejects this suggestion almost like Hippolytus rejecting the advances of Phaedra, as he has indeed previously rejected his stepmother’s kindness. Her eagerness is met with rebuffs again and again, and even with a little sermon about her duties to the poor dead aunt. ‘I’d rather have them than nothing’ sounds the plaintive note of spurned affection, though on the surface it is a complaint that Arthur up to this point has offered her no memento of the aunt.

‘Thank you.’ Charlotte lifted two or three objects up and set them down again. Though they were lighter than the materials they imitated they were so much more extravagant that they struck her in truth as rather an awkward heritage, to which she might have preferred even a matchbox or a penwiper. They were indeed shameless pinchbeck. ‘Had you any idea she had kept them?’

The lightness of the jewels reveals that they are fake.

‘I don’t at all believe she had kept them or knew they were there, and I’m very sure my father didn’t. They had quite equally worked off any tenderness for the connexion [connection]. These odds and ends, which she thought had been given away or destroyed, had simply got thrust into a dark corner and been forgotten.’’

Again, Arthur takes up and corrects an expression used by Charlotte, the seemingly innocuous word ‘kept.’

Charlotte wondered. ‘Where then did you find them?’

‘In that old tin box’ – and the young man pointed to the receptacle from which he had dislodged them and which stood on a neighbouring chair. ‘It’s rather a good box still, but I’m afraid I can’t give you that.’

Arthur’s retention of the box is of a piece with his usual stinginess about his stepmother’s things. Tintner commits a lapse in speaking of ‘a correspondence between Maupassant’s description of the “tin box” and James’s “Morocco leather box”’ (1987:231). Maupassant refers to but does not describe a Morocco leather box, in which the wife keeps her diamonds, in full view of her husband, whose neck she jokingly decks with them at one point (Maupassant, 765).

The girl took no heed of the box [gave the box no look]; she continued (319) only to look at the trinkets. ‘What corner had she found?’

The original double reference to looking suggests that the jewels attract Charlotte’s religious gaze, exerting a fascination over her.

‘She hadn’t “found” it,’ her companion sharply insisted; ‘she had simply lost it. The whole thing had passed from her mind. The box was on the top shelf of the old school-room [schoolroom] closet, which, until one put one’s head into it from a step-ladder, looked, from below, quite cleared out. The door’s [door is] narrow and the part of the closet to the left goes well into the wall. The box had stuck there for years.’

Again Arthur corrects a seeming innocent word, ‘found.’ Any language about the jewels is fraught with peril.

Even if the jewellery is obviously paste, the fact that the stepmother deliberately concealed it carries a whiff of scandal, suggesting that she clung to the theatrical past she had supposed forgotten. More denial from Arthur, who rejects Charlotte’s image of his stepmother deliberately seeking a hiding-place and insists on seeing the carefully hidden box as simply mislaid. The pearls carry a charge of pathos as relics of a tawdry theatrical world, a solace in memory to the dead aunt in her dull marriage. ‘Their melancholy and even their dignity’ leave Arthur untouched. They are also de trop, things that do not fit into the prim world of the vicarage, and that are also an awkward legacy for the governess, who would have more use for such mundane, functional, drab objects as a matchbox or a penwiper. (The two items have sexual overtones, like the notorious stick in the boat in ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ and bespeak a whole world of sexual repression.)

Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision vaguely troubled, and once more she took up two or three of the subjects of this revelation; a big bracelet in the form of a gilt serpent with many twists and beady eyes, a brazen belt studded with emeralds and rubies, a chain, of flamboyant architecture, to which, at the Theatre Royal Little Peddlington, Hamlet’s mother must have been concerned [had probably been careful] to attach the portrait of the successor to Hamlet’s father. ‘Are you very sure they’re not really worth something? Their mere weight alone – !’ she vaguely observed, balancing a moment a royal diadem that might have crowned one of the creations of the famous Mrs. Jarley.

Again her handling of the ‘subjects of this revelation’ has a ritual quality. The jewels have emerged from hiddenness like a sacred truth long concealed and now revealed. Charlotte is torn between her cousin’s dismissive respectability and the mute appeal of the theatrical jewels. The reference to Hamlet figures the stepmother in the role of Gertrude, quite the opposite of the decorous wife of a vicar. Mrs Jarley is a character in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, and her ‘creations’ are waxworks. The dramatist John Poole (c. 1786-1872) wrote a travesty of Hamlet (1810) and a two-volume work, Little Peddlington and the Peddlingtonians (1839); Little Peddlington is a fictional place. ‘You don’t compare Oxford with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums,’ wrote Grant Allen in 1894, nor can one compare a city like London with a ‘squalid little village’ like Paris. (Thrums, too, is a fictional Scottish village, from J. M. Barrie, A Window in Thrums, 1889.) All of this places the aunt’s career in a tawdry, vulgar world, far from vicarage respectability. Arthur has a touch of the brooding Hamlet, suspecting his stepmother of having betrayed his father by clinging to gifts of a former love, somewhat as Gertrude betrays Hamlet’s father with his stepfather. His lectures to Charlotte might be transpositions of the lectures he would give his stepmother were she alive to hear them, echoing Hamlet’s haranguing of Gertrude in the play.

But Arthur Prime, it was clear, had already thought the question over and found the answer easy. ‘If they had been worth anything to speak of she would long ago have sold them. My father and she had unfortunately never been in a position to keep any considerable value locked up.’ And while his companion took in the obvious force of this he went on with a flourish just marked enough not to escape her: (320) ‘If they’re worth anything at all – why[,]you’re only the more welcome to them.’

Arthur’s denial is not spontaneous, but a carefully thought out rationalization. Keeping the jewellery may have been indiscreet, but at least it shows they are not compromisingly valuable, for in that case they would have been sold. It does not occur to Arthur that his stepmother could have placed sentimental values higher than monetary ones. His ‘flourish’ is noted by Charlotte, no doubt scrutinizing it as a possible gesture of generosity or affection toward herself.

Charlotte had now in her hand a small bag of faded[,] figured silk – one of those antique conveniences that speak to us, in [the] terms of evaporated camphor and lavender, of the part they have played in some personal history; but[,] though she had for the first time drawn the string[,] she looked much more at the young man than at the questionable treasure it appeared to contain.

She has now stumbled on the genuine pearls. Since these are valuable, the aunt’s keeping of them instead of selling them shows that the personal history attached to them was precious to her. Charlotte’s eyes are on Arthur, her own personal history distracting her from the treasure she holds. ‘For the first time’ suggests that Arthur has not opened the bag.

‘I shall like them. They’re all I have.’

‘All you have – ?’

‘That belonged to her.’

He swelled a little, then looked about him as if to appeal – as against her avidity – to the whole poor place. ‘Well, what else do you want?’

‘Nothing. Thank you very much.’

Notice the delicious double entendres here. ‘They’re all I have’ suggests Charlotte’s regret that she does not have Arthur’s affection, or more radically, her sexual frustration and loneliness. Arthur again takes it up, and her clarification ‘that belonged to her’ suppresses the unspoken overtone. Arthur’s ‘what else do you want?’ refers on the surface to the aunt’s legacy, but it is more deeply a defensive reaction to her desire; her ‘nothing’ stifles her discontent with this rebuff.

With which she bent her eyes on the article wrapped, and now only exposed, in her superannuated satchel – a string [necklace] of large pearls, such a shining circle as [such as] might once have graced the neck of a provincial Ophelia and borne company to a flaxen wig. ‘This perhaps is worth something. Feel it.’ And she passed him the necklace, the weight of which she had gathered for a moment into her hand.

‘Now only exposed’ again suggests that Arthur has not found the pearls. Charlotte at last turns her eyes from Arthur to the pearls. The New York text adds the description ‘shining circle’ to make vivid this first appearance of the necklace. Charlotte still sees them as theatrical, in a failure of perception. The reference to Ophelia reminds one of the similar coldness and scolding that Hamlet showed to that tragic heroine. The fake jewels were linked with Gertrude, but the genuine pearls are linked with Ophelia. ‘Nothing. Thank you very much’ is a repetition of the earlier exchange: ‘I’d rather have them than nothing… Thank you.’ Charlotte’s repetitive words and gestures show her unable to escape from the spiral of her behaviour as a ‘loser.’

He measured it in the same way with his own, but remained quite detached. ‘Worth at most thirty shillings.’

‘Not more?’

‘Surely not if it’s paste?’

‘But is it paste?’

He gave a small sniff of impatience. ‘Pearls nearly as big as filberts?’

Filberts are hazelnuts, so named after the feast of St Philibert (August 20), since in England they ripen around that date. The pearls are thoroughly deromanticized by this talk of shillings and filberts. The cousins measure the weight and monetary value of the pearls, which will be shown as insensitive and even irreverent behavior, an intrusion of money-thinking into the sacred realm of passion and love. Note that it is Arthur who launches the word ‘paste,’ which occurs seven times, always in dependence on Arthur’s judgement.

(321) ‘But they’re heavy,’ Charlotte declared.

‘No heavier than anything else.’ And he gave them back with an allowance for her simplicity. ‘Do you imagine for a moment they’re real?’

She studied them a little, feeling them, turning them round. ‘Mightn’t they possibly be?’

‘That’s just what – to a person who knows – they’re not. These have no lustre, no play.’

‘No – they are dull. They’re opaque.’

Arthur's 'mansplaining' here comically reveals him to be a pompous ass but Charlotte sacrifices her own perceptions to his authority, falling in with his ver-emphatic dismissal of the pearls’ genuineness, and his pompous claim to be ‘a person who knows.’ The cousins unite in failing to perceive the quality of the pearls. The pathetic comedy of Charlotte’s unspoken affection continues.

‘Besides,’ he lucidly enquired, ‘how could she ever have come by them?’

‘Mightn’t they have been a present?’

Arthur stared at the question as if it were almost improper. ‘Because actresses are exposed – ?’ He pulled up, however, not saying to what, and before she could supply the deficiency had, with the sharp ejaculation of ‘No, they mightn’t!’ turned his back on her and walked away. His manner made her feel [that] she had probably been wanting in tact, and before he returned to the subject, the last thing that evening, she had satisfied herself of the ground of his resentment. They had been talking of her departure the next morning, the hour of her train and the fly that would come for her, and it was precisely these things that gave him his effective chance. ‘I really can’t allow you to leave the house under the impression that my stepmother was at any time of her life the sort of person to allow herself to be approached – ’

‘With pearl necklaces and that sort of thing?’ (322) Arthur had made for her somehow the difficulty that she couldn’t show him she understood him without seeming pert.

It at any rate only added to his own gravity. ‘That sort of thing, exactly.’

Again we have the play of sentences begun by one and finished by the other, as in ‘the sort of person to allow herself to be approached – ’ ‘With pearl necklaces and that sort of thing?,’ and of unfinished sentences such as ‘Because actresses are exposed – ’, which Arthur actually prevents Charlotte from completing. He actually feeds her lines that she cannot finish with good grace, or questions not to be answered without embarrassment, putting her in a false position; James is a master of this kind of transaction analysis. Note that it is Arthur who raises the delicate question of where his stepmother could have had genuine pearls from, and who again returns to the question that evening. It is not enough that the stepmother has buried a potentially shade past. She must have been above suspicion at all moments of her career.

‘I didn’t think when I spoke this morning – but I see what you mean.’

‘I mean that she was beyond reproach,’ said Arthur Prime.

‘A hundred times yes.’

‘Therefore if she couldn’t, out of her slender gains, ever have paid for a row of pearls – ’

‘She couldn’t, in that atmosphere, ever properly have had one? Of course she couldn’t. I’ve seen perfectly since our talk,’ Charlotte went on, ‘that that string of beads isn’t even[,] as an imitation[,] very good. The little clasp itself doesn’t seem even gold. With false pearls, I suppose,’ the girl mused, ‘it naturally wouldn’t be.’

Again Charlotte completes a question of Arthur’s. Piecing together the implication of the pearls is a collective enterprise, and the two interpreters here have missed the warm glow of the pearls, seeing them only as dull.

‘The whole thing’s rotten paste,’ her companion returned as if to have done with it. ‘If it were not, and she had kept it all these years hidden – ’

‘Yes?’ Charlotte sounded as he paused.

‘Why[,] I shouldn’t know what to think!’

Though anxious to have done with the question, Arthur cannot help returning to it and imagining the implications of the pearls being genuine. Now he abandons his previous hypothesis that the jewels were simply forgotten and countenances the idea that they were deliberately kept hidden. When Charlotte gives any sign of pursuing such speculation he rounds on her. His interrupted sentence, which after a nicely timed musical pause or suspension (‘“Yes?” Charlotte sounded as he paused’) finishes with, ‘Why I shouldn’t know what to think,’ opening up a space for the unspoken, a gap between surface assurances and suppressed reality, so that an air of mystery lingers. Arthur dreads the spread of stories about the vicar's wife's previous life, which would cause scandal among the parishioners,

‘Oh[,] I see.’ She had met him with a certain blankness, but adequately enough, it seemed, for him to regard the subject as dismissed; and there was no reversion to it between them before, on the morrow, when she had with difficulty made a place for them in her trunk, she carried off these florid survivals.

‘In due time Arthur tells his cousin Charlotte Prime to select whatever piece of past jewelry her stepmother left. Miss Prime chooses a string of pearls’ (Gale, 503), This is incorrect: Arthur asks her to take all the jewellery and she does so. Gale’s reference work is also inaccurate elsewhere. It refers to ‘the stepson of Charlotte Prime’ (sic), or of ‘Mrs Prine’ (89); it locates the Venetian Palazzo Barbaro in Rome (669); ‘Bradshaw,’ the railway guide, referred to in The Golden Bowl – ‘I’ve seen you with Bradshaw. It takes Anglo-Saxon blood’ (NYE ) –, is hilariously misidentified as ‘Prince Amerigo’s servant’ (89).

II. Charlotte and Mrs Guy at Bleet

At Bleet she found small occasion to revert to them (323) and, in an air charged with such quite other references, even felt, after she had laid them away, much enshrouded, beneath various piles of clothing, that [as if] they formed a collection not wholly without its note of the ridiculous.

Though the story is not divided into numbered parts, clearly a new section begins here. The phrase ‘an air charged with such quite other references’ suggests the opening up of vistas of perversity far indeed from the straitlaced world of the vicarage. The suppression of sexuality in the vicarage is repeated in Charlotte’s burial of the pearls, ‘much enshrouded.’ But just as the actress’s past resurfaced disturbingly in the pearls, so its buried sexual charge is ready to leap into life here in Bleet if given the least opening. The change from ‘that’ to ‘as if’ reduces Charlotte’s dismissiveness of the pearls.

Yet she was never, for the joke, tempted to show them to her pupils, though Gwendolen and Blanche[,] in particular[,] always wanted, on her return, to know what she had brought back; so that without an accident by which the case was quite changed they might have appeared to enter on a new phase of interment. The essence of the accident was the sudden illness, at the last moment, of Lady Bobby, whose advent had been so much counted on to spice the five days’ feast laid out for the coming of age of the eldest son of the house; and its equally marked effect was the dispatch [despatch]of a pressing message, in quite another direction, to Mrs. Guy, who, could she by a miracle be secured – she was always engaged ten parties deep – might be trusted to supply, it was believed, an element of exuberance scarcely less potent [active]. Mrs. Guy was already known to several of the visitors already on the scene, but she wasn’t [was not] yet known to our young lady, who found her, after many wires and counter-wires [counterwires] had at last determined the triumph of her arrival, a strange[,] charming little red-haired[,] black-dressed woman, a person with the face of a baby and the authority of a commodore. She took on the spot the discreet, the exceptional young governess into the confidence of her designs and, still more, of her doubts; intimating that it was a policy she almost always promptly pursued.

Bleet is a diminished Bly, or even, as its bleak, bleating sound suggests, a deflated Bly; Charlotte’s name recalls Charlotte Brontë, and thus the unnamed Jane Eyre-like governess of The Turn of the Screw; her pushy, selfish charges, Gwendolen and Blanche, are a parody of Flora and Miles; their names Gwendolen and Blanche evoke a pseudo-medievalism, as does the character of Rowena, from Walter Scott’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe, which might be considered the nearest literary equivalent to ‘paste’ (though James, in his literary criticism, generally refers apperciatively to Scott). Arthur Prime also has a medieval name, and there is something false about the Arthurian chivalry that he claims to live by; in his rude behaviour he is the opposite of chivalrous. He lives in chambers in the Temple, associated historically with the Knights Templar, who are dominated by the beautiful Rowena just as Mrs Guy will dominate Arthur.

Charlotte, like the carrier of some infection, is unaware of ‘what she had brought back.’ The ‘accident’ that ends the pearls’ ‘interment’ is connected with a celebration of sexuality: Lady Bobby was ‘to spice the five days’ feast laid out for the coming of age of the eldest son of the house,’ and Mrs Guy is counted on to supply ‘an element of exuberance scarcely less potent.’ The stage is being set for the re-emergence of the pearls from their long retirement. Mrs Guy exudes a lesbian aura – her androgynous name doubled by that of Lady Bobby suggests carnivalesque travesty – and this links up with the homoerotic themes of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and The Sacred Fount (as analyzed in Tintner 1995), Tintner says that Mrs Guy is ‘suspiciously like’ Maupassant (1987:231), and one could construe Maupassant’s visage in some photographs as a baby face. Mrs Guy takes ‘the discreet, the exceptional young governess into the confidence of her designs’ – it is from her point of view that Charlotte is seen as discreet and exceptional, a vessel for Mrs Guy’s overflow. (It is perhaps an indication of her powerful personality that James thus allows her point of view to take over at some points.) Some of the dialectic explored in The Sacred Fount can be traced in the relationship of the two women: Charlotte is depleted as Mrs Guy thrives and triumphs. The pearls glow unashamedly for Mrs Guy, languish in darkness for Charlotte.

There is another Mrs Guy in James’s oeuvre, Mrs Guy Brissenden in The Sacred Fount, though she is never so named, but always Grace Brissenden, as if to underline her distance from her husband, who is ‘put by himself, for some reason, in the bachelor wing’ (James 2006:14). Grace is ‘intelligent, forceful, and somewhat suspect’ (Isle, 247). In the narrator’s supposition She is thriving as her husband wanes, while another guest at Newmarch, May Server, ‘the charming, beautiful, red-haired, ingénue, with some unaccountable tragic quality about her,’ is depleted by her secret passion for Gilbert Long, ‘a hearty, robust gentleman’ (Isle, 247). Tintner shows that the correct solution, which eludes the baffled detective-narrator, is that Guy is waning because of his attachment to Gilbert, while May is the sacred fount from which Guy’s wife is drawing her new life. Mrs Brissenden leads the narrator by the nose throughout the comic novel, in scintillating conversations recalling Mrs Guy’s colloquies with Charlotte in our story. She appears ‘lighted, jewelled’ and ‘fabulous… for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and diamonds, she is still able to make’ (2006:15, 17). The narrator at one point refers to saving ‘my priceless pearl of an inquiry’ (179), which echoes Charlotte’s loss of the precious pearls in our story. The narrator acts as a detective, as does Charlotte in regard to the pearls and at the end in regard to the dealings between Mrs Guy and Arthur, and as does the ‘suppositious’ governess in ‘The Turn of the Screw.’ Strether, too, in The Ambassadors becomes a kind of detective as he unwittingly discovers the nature of the relationship between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. The huge popularity of detective fiction at this time, the age of Sherlock Holmes (since 1887), clearly influences James’s writing in these years.

‘To-morrow and Thursday are all right,’ she said (324) frankly to Charlotte on the second day, ‘but I’m not half-satisfied [half satisfied] with Friday.’

‘What improvement then do you suggest?’

‘Well, my strong point, you know, is tableaux vivants.’

‘Charming. And what is your favourite character?’

‘Boss!’ said Mrs. Guy with decision; and it was very markedly under that ensign that she had, within a few hours, completely planned her campaign and recruited her troop. Every word she uttered was to the point, but none more so than, after a general survey of their equipment, her final enquiry [inquiry] of Charlotte. She had been looking about, but half-appeased [half appeased], at the muster of decoration and drapery. ‘We shall be dull. We shall want more colour. You’ve nothing else?’

Charlotte had a thought. ‘No – I’ve some things.’

‘Then why don’t you bring them?’

The girl weighed it [hesitated]. ‘Would you come to my room?’

‘No,’ said Mrs. Guy – ‘bring them to-night to mine.’

These are the first two of seven conversations with Mrs Guy at Bleet. Charlotte appears to fear leaving the jewels out of her room, but she ends up bringing them to Mrs Guy, allowing her to keep them, and allowing her to wear the necklace, though with some unspoken reluctance. Mrs Guy progressively established a moral ownership of the pearls, to which her material acquisition of them becomes the necessary complement. Each conversation with Mrs Guy initiates Charlotte into a further depth of the mystery of the pearls and the knowing sexuality of the other woman (who is presumably a widow). The tableaux vivants recall the atmosphere of Goethe’s Elective Affinities (which would influence The Golden Bowl a few years later). It is another aspect of the theatrical fakery that runs through the story.

So Charlotte, at the evening’s end, after candlesticks had flickered through brown old passages bedward, arrived at her friend’s door with the burden of her aunt’s relics. But she promptly expressed a fear. ‘Are they too garish?’

When she had poured them out on the sofa Mrs. Guy was but a minute, before the glass, in clapping on the diadem. ‘Awfully jolly – we can do Ivanhoe!’

‘But they’re only glass and tin.’

‘Larger than life they are, rather! – which is (325) exactly what’s wanted for tableaux [what, for tableaux, is wanted]. Our jewels, for historic scenes, don’t tell – the real thing falls short. Rowena must have rubies as big as eggs. Leave them with me,’ Mrs. Guy continued – ‘they’ll inspire me. Good-night.’

The romance of a big house is a vein into which James’ pen often dips, notably in the two longer works flanking ‘Paste’: ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and The Sacred Fount. Here Charlotte’s visit to Mrs Guy’s room takes on a romantic aura, while the dim light gives the jewels a ghostly significance..The third exchange between the two women is in the key of jolliness, for the grave matter of the genuine pearls has not yet surfaced.

The next morning she was in fact – yet very strangely – inspired. ‘Yes, I’ll do Rowena. But I don’t, my dear, understand.’

‘Understand what?’

Mrs. Guy gave a very lighted stare. ‘How you come to have such things.’

Poor Charlotte smiled. ‘By inheritance.’

‘Family jewels?’

‘They belonged to my aunt, who died some months ago. She was on the stage a few years in early life, and these are a part of her trappings.’

‘She left them to you?’

‘No; my cousin, her stepson, who naturally has no use for them, gave them to me for remembrance of her. She was a dear kind thing, always so nice to me, and I was fond of her.’

Mrs. Guy had listened with frank [visible] interest. ‘But it’s he who must be a dear kind thing!’

Charlotte wondered. ‘You think so?’

‘Is he,’ her friend went on, ‘also “always so nice” to you?’

The girl, at this, face to face there with the brilliant visitor in the deserted breakfast-room, took a deeper sounding. ‘What is it?’

‘Don’t you know?’

Something came over her. ‘The pearls – ?’ But the question fainted on her lips.

The question does not ‘die’ on her lips, as in the common idiom, but ‘faints’ – matching the feeling of faintness suggested by ‘Something came over her.’ Charlotte is prone to such weakness.,, and is overwhelmed again and again. Mrs Guy is here described as the ‘brilliant visitor,’ but it will be seen that the pearls lend her a more dazzling presence.

Gale’s plot summary is inaccurate here: ‘At a party there, she is helping dress guests for a tableau vivant when vulgar Mrs Guy judges the “paste” pearls to be genuine’ (503).

(326) ‘Doesn’t he know?’

Charlotte found herself flushing. ‘They’re not paste?’

‘Haven’t you looked at them?’

She was conscious of two kinds of embarrassment. ‘You have?’

‘Very carefully.’

‘And they’re real?’

Mrs. Guy became slightly mystifying and returned for all answer: ‘Come again, when you’ve done with the children, to my room.’

This fourth conversation is located in the breakfast-room, where the two women have chatted so long that all the other guests have left. It ends in suspense: as so often in James, the blunt question receives no direct answer.

Our young woman found she had done with the children[,] that morning[,] so promptly as to reveal to them a new joy [with a promptitude that was a new joy to them], and when she reappeared before Mrs. Guy this lady had already encircled a plump white throat with the only ornament, surely, in all the late Mrs. Prime’s – the effaced Miss Bradshaw’s – collection, in the least qualified to raise a question. If Charlotte had never yet once, before the glass, tied the string of pearls about her own neck, this was because she had been capable of no such stoop [condescension] to approved ‘imitation’; but she had now only to look at Mrs. Guy to see that, so disposed, the ambiguous objects might have passed for frank originals.

Charlotte is too honest to wear imitation pearls, even if they are approved. She dislikes ambiguity. But the ambiguity of the necklace is also that of a fetish – a vulgar idol, which the pure Charlotte refuses to touch – but perhaps a truly sacred object. ‘The effaced Miss Bradshaw’ is a phrase used three times in the story; she has a posthumous revenge thanks to her pearls.

There follows the fifth conversation with Mrs Guy, the longest exchange in the story

‘What in the world have you done to them?’

‘Only handled them, understood them, admired them and put them on. That’s what pearls want; they want to be worn – it wakes them up. They’re alive, don’t you see? How have these been treated? They must have been buried, ignored, despised. They were half-dead. Don’t you know about pearls?’ Mrs. Guy threw off as she fondly fingered the necklace.

(327) ‘How should I? Do you?’

‘Everything. These were simply asleep, and from the moment I really touched them – well,’ said their wearer lovingly, ‘it only took one’s eye!’

‘Knowing’ here clearly carries the connotations of sexual knowingness. Arthur’s mistaken claim to be one who knows corresponds to his sexual obtuseness. ‘I really touched them’ – overcoming the scruples and fear with which Arthur and Charlotte hold them at a distance. Charlotte lacks an ‘eye’ for the pearls, though she has ‘bent her eyes’ on them earlier, and on may say that she lacks a heart for them. Mrs Guy speaks of them ‘lovingly,’ and later calls them ‘darlings.’

Knowing about pearls is not, of course, an esoteric matter; even the stolid Arthur has some of that knowledge, and women often talk about how their pearls need to be worn to come alive; as organic matter they flourish on the warmth of human skin. James, an expert on ‘the art of dress’ (Hughes 2001), would be conversant with such lore. But as the story proceeds the discourse on pearls becomes more intensely erotic and sacral, and knowing about pearls takes on the status of a mystic initiation.

‘It took more than mine – though I did just wonder; and than Arthur’s,’ Charlotte brooded. She found herself almost panting. ‘Then their value – ?’

‘Oh their value’s excellent.’

The girl, for a deep contemplative moment [a deep moment], took another plunge into the wonder, the beauty and the mystery [and mystery]. ‘Are you sure?’

The sacral aura surrounding the pearls is deepened, with the vocabulary of contemplation, wonder, mystery.

Her companion wheeled round for impatience. ‘Sure? For what kind of an idiot, my dear, do you take me?’

Charlotte’s laboured literalness, her stumbling over epistemology instead of following intuition, makes her an ‘idiot,’ who annoys Mrs Guy by her obtuseness. The movements of the characters are marked dramatically: Arthur’s characteristic movement is to turn away and sometimes to swoop back. Mrs Guy shows a comparable liveliness of movement, swooping down eagerly on Charlotte on three occasions when they meet. Here she ‘wheels’ about like some predatory bird.

It was beyond Charlotte Prime to say. ‘For the same kind as Arthur – and as myself,’ she could only suggest. ‘But my cousin didn’t know. He thinks they’re worthless.’

‘Because of the rest of the lot? Then your cousin’s an ass. But what – if, as I understood you, he gave them to you – has he to do with it?’

‘Why[,] if he gave them to me as worthless and they turn out precious – !’

‘You must give them back? I don’t see that – if he was such a noodle [fool]. He took the risk.’

Arthur is now treated as an ‘ass’ and a ‘noodle’ by the confident, rude, and impatient Mrs Guy. Her rather unscrupulous moral reasoning proclaims the privileges of those who know over idiots – with the undertone of those who know sexually, who are competent in the game of seduction. As to Charlotte’s moral scruples, which play a great role in the rest of the story, we are invited not to take them at face value. What Lacan says of the moral scruples preventing Hamlet from avenging his father applies here: ‘A scruple of conscience can only be considered as a symptomatic elaboration’ (2013:284); ‘it is the conscious representation of something that is articulated in the unconscious’ (291). Hamletian inhibition prevails in all of James’s sensitive characters, given to endless deconstructive deferrals and second thoughts and quite unable to enfoncer le clou. The Master’s style perfectly espouses this; it was his very element, as shown in his compulsively periphrastic communication in ordinary life (see Nowell-Smith, 10-21), and it explains why he could dictate such complex prose without difficulty.

Moralistic critics cannot imagine that the story could win some admiration for the intrepid Mrs Guy (whose name, after all, is a tribute to the admired Maupassant, even if James was troubled by his vulgarity and amoralism). An early reviewer saw the story as a study in ‘the hidden depths of human meanness’ (cited, Taylor, 288). Tintner refers to the stepmother as ‘the guilty woman.’ Many critics make much of Charlotte’s ethical uprightness, commending her return of the necklace as ‘evidence of moral perspicacity, not excessive scrupulousness’ (Kirkham, 469). But James is not primarily an ethical writer, at least in this story; rather he is concerned with ‘something much more radical and more concrete’ (304) that brings him close to psychoanalysis. True, What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age give a moral critique of a vulgar and promiscuous London society. But this does not carry over into ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ ‘Paste,’ The Sacred Fount (which is not much concerned with showing the sexual affairs to be ‘squalid,’ pace Isle, 259), and especially The Ambassadors, where the moral irony is turned on puritanism and its obtuseness. In a very broad sense, to be sure, James’s concerns culminate in an ethical vision, or at least a brooding on the problem of finding ethical direction in the modern world where traditional references are devalued (see Pippin).

Charlotte’s scruple is of a piece with the inhibited nature of her love for her cousin. The cousin acts very much as an elder brother, and perhaps an incest taboo hovers over their relationship. Charlotte herself seems to have no immediate family other than the cousin, and she looks to him with the dependency of an orphaned soul rather than the passion of a lover. Hamlet’s inhibition is described by Freud as follows: ‘He cannot take revenge on a man who has removed his father and taken the latter’s place beside his mother, a man who has realized the desires of his childhood’ (cited, Lacan 2013:283). Charlotte’s moral scruples, which exasperate Mrs Guy, express an unconscious barrier on her side in her relation to Arthur, which is matched on his by a rude gruffness, as if he, too, unconsciously knows that a barrier must be set up.

Charlotte fed, in fancy, on the pearls, which[,] decidedly[,] were exquisite, but which at the present moment somehow presented themselves much more as Mrs. Guy’s than either as Arthur’s or as her own. ‘Yes – he did take it; even after I had distinctly hinted to him that they looked to me different from the other pieces.’

The anorexic Charlotte feeds on the pearls, but only in fancy. She perhaps feels jealousy of Mrs Guy who has made the pearls so much her own. Tintner supposes that James is saying ‘that the story belongs to Maupassant more than to himself, a bit of ingenious internalized wit’ (1987:231).

(328) ‘Well then!’ said Mrs. Guy with something more than triumph – with a positive odd relief.

But it had the effect of making our young woman think with more intensity. ‘Ah you see he thought they couldn’t be different, because – so peculiarly – they shouldn’t be.’

Mrs Guy’s relief only increases Charlotte’s scrupulous brooding. The play of verbal moods again shows how sexual reality is repressed as impossible, because morally unacceptable. Arthur’s earlier ‘They won’t say it! They shan’t!’ is echoed in Charlotte’s ‘They couldn’t… because they shouldn’t.’

‘Shouldn’t? I don’t understand.’

‘Why[,] how would she have got them?’ – so Charlotte candidly put it.

‘She? Who?’ There was a capacity in Mrs. Guy’s tone for a sinking of persons – !

‘Why[,] the person I told you of: his stepmother, my uncle’s wife – among whose poor old things, extraordinarily thrust away and out of sight, he happened to find them.’

Charlotte must feel as if she herself is ‘sinking,’ faced with Mrs Guy’s direct, invasive ‘tone,’ which she herself could never match. The narrator of The Sacred Fount is similarly defeated by Mrs Guy Brissenden’s tone, in the last sentence of the novel: ‘It wasn’t really that I hadn’t three times her method. What I so fatally lacked was her tone’ (James 2006:193). Isle thinks that this is ‘the tone of the society… a tone of harsh, insolent reality’ (261), and this would fit Mrs Guy too; but in both cases the tone is rather that of a woman at home with the sexual world. The interlocutors of the triumphant women in both cases are not morally flabbergasted but simply made to feel their sexual and affective inadequacy and their lack of understanding.

Charlotte could have fed on the pearls, but she is starved by her scruples, corresponding to her undernourished sexually. The hidden pearls represented the repressed sexuality of Arthur’s mother. One wonders how she mothered him. He seems to have internalized his father’s priggishness and to continue the father’s repression of the stepmother’s sexuality.

Mrs. Guy came a step nearer to the effaced Miss Bradshaw. ‘Do you mean she may have stolen them?’

‘No. But she had been an actress.’

‘Oh[,] well then,’ cried Mrs. Guy, ‘wouldn’t that be just how?’

‘Yes, except that she wasn’t at all a brilliant one, nor in receipt of large pay.’ The girl even threw off a nervous joke. ‘I’m afraid she couldn’t have been our Rowena.’

Mrs. Guy took it up. ‘Was she very ugly?’

‘No. She may very well, when young, have looked rather nice.’

‘Well[,] then!’ was Mrs. Guy’s sharp comment and fresh triumph.

‘You mean it was a present? That’s just what he so dislikes the idea of her having received – a (329) present from an admirer capable of going such lengths.’

‘Because she wouldn’t have taken it for nothing? Speriamo – that she wasn’t a brute. The “length” her admirer went was the length of a whole row. Let us hope she was just a little kind!’

Worldly permissiveness is Mrs Guy’s element – she has some of the cynicism that shocked James in Maupassant himself. The use of words in European languages – ‘Speriamo’ – is a useful cipher of sophistication. It is impossible to imagine Charlotte such an idiomatic expression in French or Italian. Note that Mrs Guy immediately leaps to the conclusions that Arthur feared the jewels might inspire.

‘Well,’ Charlotte went on, ‘that she was “kind” might seem to be shown by the fact that neither her husband, nor his son, nor I, his niece, knew or dreamed of her possessing anything so precious; by her having kept the gift all the rest of her life beyond discovery – out of sight and protected from suspicion.’

‘As if, you mean’ – Mrs. Guy was quick – ‘she had been wedded to it and yet was ashamed of it? Fancy,’ she laughed while she manipulated the rare beads, ‘being ashamed of these!’

The rhythmic break in this last sentence allows the pearls to put in another appearance, now as the object of Mrs Guy’s manipulations.

‘But you see she had married a clergyman.’

‘Yes, she must have been “rum.” But at any rate he had married her. What did he suppose?’

‘Why[,] that she had never been of the sort by whom such offerings are encouraged.’

Mrs Guy catches herself up not so much to conceal her worldly cynicism but because she realizes that Charlotte is precisely the sort not to encourage such amorous attentions, and because she does not wish to offend Charlotte, whom she actually likes.

‘Was he[,] then, if only her stepson – ’

‘So fond of her as that comes to? Yes; he had never known, consciously, his real mother, and, without children of her own, she was very patient and nice with him. And I liked her so,’ the girl pursued, ‘that at the end of ten years, in so strange a manner, to “give her away” – ’

(330) ‘Is impossible to you? Then don’t!’ said Mrs. Guy with decision.

The stepmother’s patience and niceness with Arthur suggests that he was a difficult, perhaps nasty charge.

‘Ah[,] but if they’re real I can’t keep them!’ Charlotte, with her eyes on them, moaned in her impatience. ‘It’s too difficult.’

‘Where’s the difficulty, if he has such sentiments that he’d rather sacrifice the necklace than admit it, with the presumption it carries with it, to be genuine? You’ve only to be silent.’

The italicized ‘I’ indicates not only a practical difficulty but a sense that the necklace is not made for her. Mrs Guy’s amusement is not to Charlotte’s taste; she conspicuously lacks a sense of humour. Is Mrs Guy already thinking of buying the necklace from Charlotte?

Her companion walked round her for a look at the affair from behind. The clasp was certainly, doubtless intentionally, misleading, but everything else was indeed lovely. ‘Well, I must think. Why didn’t she sell them?’ Charlotte broke out in her trouble.

Mrs. Guy had an instant answer. ‘Doesn’t that prove what they secretly recalled to her? You’ve only to be silent!’ she ardently repeated.

‘I must think – I must think!’

Mrs. Guy stood with her hands attached but motionless. ‘Then you want them back?’

As if with the dread of touching them Charlotte retreated to the door.

Again the dread the pearls inspire is dramatized. Charlotte’s retreat even suggests she is walking backward, as if withdrawing from a sacred presence.

‘I’ll tell you to-night.’

‘But may I wear them?’

‘Meanwhile?’

‘This evening – at dinner.’

It was the sharp[,] selfish pressure of this that really, on the spot, determined the girl; but for the moment, before closing the door on the question, she only said: ‘As you like!’

Charlotte is indecisive, and is easily steamrolled by Mrs Guy, who knows what she wants. But in what way does Mrs Guy’ request ‘determine’ her? Does ‘closing the door on the question’ refer to a resolve she has made, or to her literally closing the door as she leaves the room? Her second visit to Mrs Guy’s room has been rich in revelations, but also is the promise of a great revelation that evening.

(331) They were busy much of the day with preparation and rehearsal, and at dinner[,] that evening[,] the concourse of guests was such that a place among them for Miss Prime failed to find itself marked.

Charlotte, under her formal name as governess, is also relegated to a very secondary place in the grammatical structure of this sentence. Unlike Mrs Guy, who always attracts to much attention, Charlotte’s fate is to be overlooked, a fate she suffers passively. The word ‘triumph’ occurs thrice in connection with Mrs Guy; inevitably, the word ‘failure’ hovers over Charlotte.

At the time the company rose she was therefore alone in the school-room [schoolroom] where, towards eleven o’clock, she received a visit from Mrs. Guy. This lady’s white shoulders heaved, under the pearls, with an emotion that the very red lips which formed, as if for the full effect, the happiest opposition of colour, were not slow to translate. ‘My dear, you should have seen the sensation – they’ve had a success!’

We know of the success only from Mrs Guy’s report in this sixth conversation. The story artfully confines itself to tête-à-têtes, forgoing the description of public events such as the funeral, the dinners, and the festivities. The essential action concerns only the three protagonists and the pearls. Mrs Guy now appears as something of a beauty, with the humourous account, in an elegantly constructed sentence, of the colour-contrast between her heaving naked shoulders and her painted lips.

Charlotte, dumb a moment, took it all in. ‘It is as if they knew it – they’re more and more alive. But so much the worse for both of us! I can’t,’ she brought out with an effort, ‘be silent.’

Characteristically of the tight dramatic linkage of the dialogue, her words take up Mrs Guy’s repeated ‘You’ve only to be silent.’ ‘It is as if they knew it’ refers back to Mrs Guy’s earlier animistic language: ‘they want to be worn – it wakes them up. They’re alive.’ The pearls are growing in presence in a quite magical way. Charlotte is coming to ‘know about pearls’ and to see the necklace now no longer as just a relic, mute testimony to the past, but as alive and even aware. She brings out ‘with an effort’ the words that express the resolve to which Mrs Guy’s pushy demand ‘determined’ her. Is she motivated in part by resentment of Mrs Guy’s success?

‘You mean to return them?’

‘If I don’t I’m a thief.’

Mrs. Guy gave her a long[,] hard look: what was decidedly not of the baby in Mrs. Guy’s face was a certain air of established habit in the eyes.

Charlotte’s sharply moralistic utterance is a criticism of her friend and a mark of friction between them, and Mrs Guy seems to be asking why Charlotte is being so awkward. The habit her eyes reveal must be one of selfish calculation. Having an eye is not only a mark of sensitivity to beauty, but also of a keen sense of where one’s advantage lies. Mrs Guy triumphs through both uses of her eyes.

Then, with a sharp little jerk of her head and a backward reach of her bare beautiful arms, she undid the clasp and, taking off the necklace, laid it on the table. ‘If you do[,] you’re a goose.’

‘Well, of the two – !’ said our young lady, gathering it up with a sigh. And as if to get it, for the pang it gave, out of sight as soon as possible, she shut it up, clicking the lock, in the drawer of her own little table; after which, when she turned again, her companion looked naked and plain without it [her companion, without it, looked naked and plain].

This is the only place in the story where Charlotte is visualized turning away and back; her action usually consists more in thought than in movement. Mrs Guy wants the pearls because she wants the beauty and attractiveness they give her. ‘Brilliant’ though she is, and ‘beautiful’ as her arms may be, without the pearls she looks naked and plain; it is not impossible that Charlotte notes this with satisfaction. Charlotte, too, could be transformed into a beautiful woman if she used properly the pearls and all that they symbolize. But she is too ‘plain’ to think of ornament, too straightforward to think of seduction. Charlotte chooses not to be a ‘thief,’ and her moral discrimination is genuine, there is no ‘paste’ in it. Nonetheless she must pay a price, which is to remain a real ‘goose.’ Her renunciation is metonymically a renunciation of sexuality, or a repression, vividly enacted in ‘she shut it up, clicking the lock, in the drawer of her own little table.’ Her aunt, too, had renounced and repressed her sexuality, by hiding the pearls in a box, though a more capacious one than Charlotte’s little drawer. ‘Clicking the lock’ adds an extra touch of decisiveness, and the sound must have been disheartening to Mrs Guy, who becomes angry. There may be a slight contradiction in the text her: ‘her own little table’ suggests that we are in Charlotte’s room, whereas the scene is set in the schoolroom, where she would surely not leave the pearls. Yet one recalls that the aunt also hid the tin box containing the jewellery in the vicarage schoolroom.

‘But what will you say?’ it then occurred to her to demand.

(332) ‘Downstairs – to explain?’ Mrs. Guy was[,] after all[,] trying at least to keep her temper. ‘Oh[,] I’ll put on something else and say the clasp’s broken [that clasp is broken]. And you won’t of course name me to him,’ she added.

‘As having undeceived me? No – I’ll say that, looking at the thing more carefully, it’s my own private idea.’

The sudden reference to Arthur indicated that Mrs Guy is busily scheming how she can get her hands on the pearls. She is perhaps calculating in advance that Arthur will not associate her seductive overtures to him with interest in the pearls, if he has no reason to suppose she knows their value.

‘And does he know how little you really know?’

‘As an expert – surely. And he has always much [has much, always,] the conceit of his own opinion.’

‘Then he won’t believe you – as he so hates to. He’ll stick to his judgement and maintain his gift, and we shall have the darlings back!’ With which reviving assurance Mrs. Guy kissed her young friendfor good-night [kissed for good-night].

Mrs Guy’s optimism will, however, be checked by long delays, for which Charlotte is responsible.

She was not, however, to be gratified or justified by any prompt event, for, whether or no paste entered into the composition of the ornament in question, Charlotte shrank from the temerity of dispatching [despatching] it to town by post. Mrs. Guy was thus disappointed of the hope of seeing the business settled – ‘by return,’ she had seemed to expect – before the end of the revels. The revels, moreover, rising to a frantic pitch, pressed for all her attention, and it was at last only in the general confusion of leave-taking that she made, parenthetically, a dash at the person in the whole company with whom her contact had been most interesting [her young friend].

We shift to Mrs Guy’s point of view in these lines; the NYE text avoids repeating ‘her young friend’ by referring to ‘the person in the whole company with whom her contact had been most interesting.’ This adds a substantial reference to Mrs Guy’s feeling for Charlotte. The passage is the second point in the story at which Charlotte’s point of view is replaced by Mrs Guy’s, and the alteration increases this effect, instead of diminishing it in favour of ‘unity of point of view’ – supposing this to be an aesthetic principle implicitly adopted by the story, comparable to the Neo-Aristotelian ‘Three Unities’ (which James actually observes in The Sacred Fount, structured as a five-act drama; see Isle, 255).

‘Come, what will you take for them?’

‘The pearls? Ah, you’ll have to treat with my cousin.’

(333) Mrs. Guy, with quick intensity, lent herself. ‘Where then does he live?’

‘In chambers in the Temple. You can find him.’

‘But what’s the use, if you do neither one thing nor the other?’

‘Oh[,] I shall do the “other,”’ Charlotte said: ‘I’m only waiting till I go up. You want them so awfully?’ She curiously, solemnly again, sounded her.

‘I’m dying for them. There’s a special charm in them – I don’t know what it is: they tell so their history.’

‘But what do you know of that?’

‘Just what they themselves say. It’s all in them – and it comes out. They breathe a tenderness – they have the white glow of it. My dear,’ hissed Mrs. Guy in supreme confidence and as she buttoned her glove – ‘they’re things of love!’

‘Oh!’ our young person [woman] vaguely exclaimed.

‘They’re things of passion!’

‘Mercy!’ she gasped, turning short off.

Greed for the pearls is Mrs Guy’s dominant passion, which had made her positively angry at the barrier created by Charlotte’s scruples, and which has her now act decisively, directly offering money, and then quickly securing Arthur’s address. Though she is the most business-like and materialistic of the protagonists, without the scruples and postures of the cousins, Mrs Guy recognizes the superior values of love and passion and is willing to pay hard cash for them. Charlotte still has the pearls in her possession and since she is ‘penniless’ there is a rather heroic uprightness in her resolve to restore them to Arthur. It will be several months until she gets to London, months of agonized frustration, no doubt, for Mrs Guy.

The climax of Mrs Guy’s revelations, in this seventh conversation, makes the pearls consubstantial with passion. Charlotte is struck dumb as before a mystical hierophany. Her reaction of dismay, ‘Oh!’ and ‘Mercy!,’ is very funny, but the mild expletive ‘Mercy!’ could also carry a quasi-religious connotation of abasement before an overwhelming revelation. The word ‘things’ takes up the first references to the jewellery: ‘I’ve found a lot more things,’ ‘things of the theatre… things of the vicarage,’ but ‘things’ now resonates, in the last two of its eleven occurrences in reference to the jewels, with climactic sacral emphasis.

But these words remained, though indeed their help was scarce needed, Charlotte being in private face to face with a new light, as she by this time felt she must call it, on the dear dead[,] kind[,] colourless lady whose career had turned so sharp a corner in the middle. The pearls had quite taken their place as a revelation.

The pearls reveal how sharp the corner was that separated the actress from the vicar’s wife, and how painful the unspoken renunciation it entailed. But the reconstruction of the aunt’s past is not the only content of the light of revelation emanating from the pearls.

She might have received them for nothing – admit that; but she couldn’t have kept them so long and so unprofitably hidden, couldn’t have enjoyed them only in secret, for nothing; and she had mixed them[,] in her reliquary[,] with false things[,] in order to put curiosity and detection off the scent. Over this strange (334) fact poor Charlotte interminably mused: it became more touching, more attaching for her than she could now confide to any ear. How bad[,] or how happy – in the sophisticated sense of Mrs. Guy and the young man at the Temple – the effaced Miss Bradshaw must have been to have had to be so mute!

It is now supposed that Mrs Prime did not merely hide the pearls, but took them out of the hiding-place in order to enjoy them secretly. This confirms Mrs Guy’s image of her as ‘wedded’ to them, and it also fills out the image of a woman not fulfilled by her role of wife and mother in a vicarage and keeping up a quasi-adulterous hankering for a past love. The ‘false things’ surrounding the necklace are not real things at all in the charged sacral sense the word ‘things’ acquires in the story (conveyed here by the word ‘reliquary’).

Charlotte’s morality now wavers, as ‘bad’ and ‘happy’ blur; perhaps it is Mrs Guy who gives the sophisticated sense of ‘happy’ and Arthur who gives the sophisticated sense of ‘bad.’ Now we have the closest vision of the dead woman and her pearls. She enjoyed them in secret as the treasure of a past love (much as the wife’s fondling of her pearls in ‘Les Bijoux’ corresponds to her feeling for her lover). Her long silence testified to the depth of that remembered romance. Charlotte herself shares the dead woman’s muteness, for she cannot confide to any ear how the pearls touch her. She, like her aunt, succumbs to their seduction in secret.

The little governess at Bleet put on the necklace now in secret sessions; she wore it sometimes under her dress; she came to feel[,] verily[,] a haunting passion for it. Yet in her penniless state she would have parted with it for money; she gave herself also to dreams of what in this direction it would do for her.

As if corrupted by Mrs Guy’s passion, by her aunt’s example, or by the pearls themselves, she contemplates them and carries them in secret (she is not able to wear them openly). But distracted by a monetary line of thought, she misses what the pearls can ‘do for her,’ namely change her into a seductive woman. She does not follow the ‘haunting passion’ they inspire in her, but falls back on flat, dull, unimaginative thinking – for which she will be punished. These pearls demand single-minded devotion.

The sophistry of her so often saying to herself that Arthur had after all definitely pronounced her welcome to any gain from his gift that might accrue – this trick remained innocent, as she perfectly knew it for what it was. Then there was always the possibility of his – as she could only picture it – rising to the occasion. Mightn’t he have a grand magnanimous moment? – mightn’t he just say[:] ‘Oh[,] I couldn’t of course [of course I couldn’t] have afforded to let you have it if I had known; but since you have got it, and have made out the truth by your own wit, I really can’t screw myself down to the shabbiness of taking it back’?

Her hope that Arthur will magnanimously let her keep it we can guess to be vain, from his earlier stinginess. He will both keep the necklace and keep the moral satisfaction of regarding it as mere paste. Pathetically, she dreams of his undeserved praise; but even if he were to ascribe the discovery to her own wit, he would not thank her for the implied imputation on his mother’s honour.

III. Charlotte Returns the Pearls to Arthur

She had, as it proved, to wait a long time – to wait till, at the end of several months, the great house of Bleet had, with due deliberation, for the season, transferred itself to town; after which, however, she fairly snatched at her first freedom to knock, dressed in her best and armed with her disclosure, at the door of her doubting kinsman. It was still with doubt and not quite with the face she had hoped that (335) he listened to her story. He had turned pale, she thought, as she produced the necklace, and he appeared[,] above all[,] disagreeably affected. Well, perhaps there was reason, she more than ever remembered; but what on earth was one, in close touch with the fact, to do? She had laid the pearls on his table, where, without his having at first put so much as a finger to them, they met his hard[,] cold stare.

The change of scene ushers in the third part of the story, and Charlotte’s second conversation with Arthur. Charlotte’s eagerness to meet Arthur – ‘she fairly snatched at her first freedom to knock’ – is not due only to the need to restore the pearls; ‘dressed in her best and armed with her disclosure,’ she is out to seduce her cousin. But her method is hopelessly awkward; instead of wearing the pearls with her dress she ‘produces’ them and places them on the table. His face disappoints her – he is doubtful and ‘disagreeably affected’ – and the exposure of the pearls draws only ‘his hard cold stare.’ It is as if Charlotte has exposed herself and met only misogynous contempt. Even the phrase ‘without his having at first put so much as a finger to them’ indicates not only a sense that the pearls are polluting, but also how far he is from touching Charlotte, his painful distance from her.

‘I don’t believe in them,’ he simply said at last.

‘That’s exactly then,’ she returned with some spirit, ‘what I wanted to hear!’

She fancied that at this his colour changed; it was indeed vivid to her afterwards – for she was to have a long recall of the scene – that she had made him quite angrily flush. ‘It’s a beastly unpleasant imputation, you know!’ – and he walked away from her as he had always walked at the vicarage.

Charlotte may regret that she spoke so warmly in agreement with Arthur’s declaration of disbelief in the pearls (with the overtone also of religious belief and disbelief). Though he again speaks in the register of respectability and bullying denial, using language that sounds like that of a schoolboy: ‘It’s a beastly unpleasant imputation,’ she may have aroused his suspicion by her eagerness to have the pearls. Also his anger here may come from her reference to the suspicion the pearls arouse and perhaps also from his sense that she does not really reject that suspicion.

Charlotte has now landed in the most untoward position of arguing with Arthur about his stepmother’s virtue, for in rejecting the blame for what the pearls say she must transfer it to the dead woman. The exclamations ‘why’ and ‘well,’ sprinkled throughout the story, take on an aggressive overtone here.

He said nothing more, for a moment, on this; he only came back to the table. ‘They’re what I originally said they were. They’re rotten paste.’

‘Arthur still pretends that they are paste’ (Gale, 503). This suggests that he was already pretending in the first scene; but in that case he would not have given them to Charlotte.

‘Then I may keep them?’

‘No. I want a better opinion.’

‘Than your own?’

‘Than your own.’ He dropped on the pearls another queer stare; [,] then, after a moment, bringing himself to touch them, did exactly what she had herself done in the presence of Mrs. Guy at Bleet – (336) gathered them together, marched off with them to a drawer, put them in and clicked the key.

Arthur brings himself to touch the polluting, dangerous objects (as he might bring himself to touch a woman). Just as she did at Bleet, he impounds the pearls. James underlines the parallel. The pearls induce repetitive patterns of behaviour. In this case, the behaviour of both cousins is repressive, not only of the sexually ambiguous pearls but of the pleasure that someone else might have in them. Arthur treats Charlotte as she has treated Mrs Guy.

‘You say I’m afraid,’ he went on as he again met her; ‘but I shan’t be afraid to take them to Bond Street.’

‘And if the people say they’re real – ?’

He had a pause and then his strangest manner. [He hesitated – then had his strangest manner.] ‘They won’t say it! They shan’t!’

There was something in the way he brought it out that deprived poor Charlotte, as she was perfectly aware, of any manner at all. ‘Oh!’ she simply sounded, as she had sounded for her last word to Mrs. Guy; and within a minute, without more conversation, she had taken her departure.

Again the parallel is underlined between how Charlotte is left gasping here and with Mrs Guy at Bleet. In both cases she faces strong-willed people whose manner is decisive even when forced or deceptive. In her last exchange with Mrs Guy it was the ‘passion’ attributed to the jewels that floored her, now it is the denial and repression of that passion by Arthur.

IV. Charlotte and Mrs Guy at Eaton Square.

A fortnight later she received a communication from him, and toward [towards] the end of the season one of the entertainments in Eaton Square was graced by the presence of Mrs. Guy. Charlotte was not at dinner, but she came down afterwards, and this guest, on seeing her, abandoned a very beautiful young man on purpose to cross and speak to her. The guest displayed [had on] a lovely necklace and had apparently not lost her habit of overflowing with the pride of such ornaments.

Once again Charlotte is forgotten and misses the dinner, in line with her anorexic role, Just as she did at their last meeting at Bleet, she The reference to the ‘very beautiful young man’ suggests that the pearls have given Mrs Guy a sexual success unknown to her in her years as an entertainer. Like Mrs Guy Brissenden, who ‘looks about twenty’ and ‘has grown so very much less plain’ (2006: 15, 17), Mrs Guy has recovered youth, and may be further rejuvenated by drinking from the ‘sacred fount’ represented by the beautiful young man.

‘Do you see?’ She was in high joy.

They were indeed splendid pearls – so far as poor Charlotte could feel that she knew, after what had come and gone, about such mysteries. The poor girl [Charlotte] had a sickly smile. ‘They’re almost as fine as Arthur’s.’

‘Almost? Where, my dear, are your eyes? They are “Arthur’s”!’ After which, to meet the flood of crimson that accompanied her young friend’s start: (337) ‘I tracked them – after your folly, and, by miraculous luck, recognised them in the Bond Street window to which he had disposed of them.’

‘Disposed of them?’ Charlotte [the girl] gasped. ‘He wrote me that I had insulted his mother and that the people had shown him he was right – had pronounced them utter paste.’

Mrs. Guy gave a stare. ‘Ah[,] I told you he wouldn’t bear it! No. But I had, I assure you,’ she wound up, ‘to drive my bargain!’

Charlotte scarce heard or saw; she was full of her private wrong. ‘He wrote me,’ she panted, ‘that he had smashed them.’

‘The contrast between the two women here corresponds to that between the flourishing Madame Forestier and the depleted Mathilde in the final scene of Maupassant’s ‘La Parure.’

‘They are “Arthur’s”!’ The inverted commas show that they are no longer his, but hers. Since pearls are by essence costly, the question arises: What did she pay for them? Arthur’s ‘communication’ is first mentioned casually. Its wounding content is revealed in Charlotte’s outburst.

Mrs Guy challenges Charlotte to open her eyes: ‘Do you see?’ ‘Where, my dear, are your eyes?’ Charlotte is punished throughout the story for not having ‘eyes.’ Her imperceptiveness is double: failure to recognize the potent charm of the pearls, and naïve scrupulousness about returning them to their rightful owner. A friend of mind picked up a Matisse lithograph in a flea-market for 300 Euro; its value was later assessed at 80,000 Euro – a reward for having eyes. Indeed, for Henry James the supreme and all-comprehending virtue is to have eyes – for beauty, for moral distinctions and refinements, for psychological profundities.

Mrs. Guy could only wonder and pity. ‘He’s really morbid!’ But it wasn’t quite clear which of the pair she pitied; though the young person employed in Eaton Square [Charlotte] felt really morbid too after they had separated and she found herself full of thought. She even went the length of asking herself what sort of a bargain Mrs. Guy had driven and whether the marvel of the recognition in Bond Street had been a veracious account of the matter. Hadn’t she perhaps in truth dealt with Arthur directly? It came back to Charlotte almost luridly that she had had his address.

Charlotte almost faints again, as lurid suspicions crowd in on her. Mrs Guy displays ‘wonder and pity’ – but for Charlotte, not Arthur; for on the supposition that Arthur gave her the pearls himself she is well aware of Arthur’s true sentiments. Charlotte is again overwhelmed by revelations of sexual import. When she ‘goes the length’ of imagining a liaison between Mrs Guy and Arthur, this echoes the liaison between her aunt and the ‘admirer capable of going such lengths’ as discussed with Mrs Guy. Outwitted by two liars, the too honest Charlotte meets final defeat, registered in a painful introspection in which she wonders ‘what sort of a bargain Mrs. Guy had driven.’ This echoes Mrs Guy’s words, which now take on a new meaning: ‘I had, I assure you… to drive my bargain!’ We are free to suppose that Mrs Guy struck a sexual bargain with the respectable Arthur, another instance of the pearls’ magically corrupting influence. The gap between respectable appearance and sexual reality in the aunt, in Arthur, and in Mrs Guy, leaves the naïve Charlotte out-manoeuvred in every direction. One could suppose other situations, which the story does not exclude, for instance that Mrs Guy simply asked Arthur for the pearls as worthless trash and that he handed them over to her without making a fuss; but the hints in the tale do not point in that direction.

If the pearls embody a set of contrasts between appearance and reality, this ladders out to all the situations in the story, bringing sorrow to Charlotte, triumph to Mrs Guy, and also perhaps to the real Arthur concealed by his wooden façade—or is he merely a pawn in Mrs Guy’s predatory lust for the pearls? The collusion between Charlotte’s two interlocutors closes a loop, leaving Charlotte on the outside. Her position parallels that of the sensitive but baffled narrator of The Sacred Fount, or of Strether in regard to the Chad and Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors, or of Maggie Verver in the first half of The Golden Bowl and Charlotte Stant in the second. Her final insight can be linked to the disillusioning epiphanies that overwhelm Isabel Archer, Strether, Milly Theale, Maggie, all of which concern a concealed sexual connection. Thus in the facets of this bitter-sweet little comedy we catch reflections of the great themes that the major works so exhaustively explore. Gale’s summary takes no notice of the underlying theme of seduction or the final resonant ambiguities: ‘The woman rather sickens Charlotte by informing her that she bought the pearls from a dealer to whom Arthur sold them’ (504).

The periphrases designating Charlotte always portray her as confined by her sexless role: ‘the young person employed in Eaton Square’ (added in NYE). The sexual suspicion alighting on the present wearer of the pearls rather shockingly concerns the flinty Arthur also. ‘Mrs Guy could only wonder and pity’ is a description of her face and tone from Charlotte’s point of view as she utters the words, ‘He’s really morbid.’ Mrs Guy is supposed never to have met Arthur, but does she here speak of him as if she has? Why did Mrs Guy seduce Arthur? Not, probably, because of his own charms, but in order to have the precious pearls. Her passion is for them, and her love for them is the most intense relationship in the story.

The story ends with a rueful sense of loss, as does ‘The Aspern Papers.’ The destruction of the precious papers by the castratory act of Miss Tita leaves the narrator feeling deprived – of what? Not of the papers, nor of Miss Tita. Fundamentally, the loss is sexual; in Lacanian terms the papers were his ‘object a,’ the agalma that the beloved is imagined to conceal, and its disappearance leaves him unmanned, or forced to face the vacuity of his fetishistic desire. Something similar might be said of the treasures destroyed at the end of The Spoils of Poynton. What Mrs Guy has stolen from Charlotte is neither the pearls nor her cousin, but her sexuality; she has placed Charlotte entirely in the position of a sexual loser. Her double expertise in seducing the man and securing the pearls shows up Charlotte’s incompetence on both fronts.

Looking back on the tale we note its economy, its exclusive focus on the three protagonists, and also a schematic character to the little drama. The characters remain two-dimensional, each with his or her fixed role in the triangular equation. They are typical of James’s shorter tales in this. Contrast the similar triangle between Milly, Densher, and Kate in The Wings of the Dove. There the layers upon layers of complex and conflicted motivation made the theme inexhaustible; the vast novel was too short to exhaust the subject; and the three characters exert a fascination that makes their company welcome for the entire length of the work, whereas no one would wish to read a whole novel about Charlotte, Arthur, and Mrs Guy. Again, in The Golden Bowl, the triad of Maggie Verver, Prince Amerigo, and Charlotte Stant, this time exhaustively explored – too exhaustively, James himself felt – takes on a vast range of iridescent hues as it is turned about in the reflecting consciousness of the three and of the external observers, the Assinghams. The short story allowed James to portray narrow obessions, with characters defined by their ruling obsession. In ‘Paste’ we have three obsessions, Arthur’s chivalrous concern for his mother’s honour, Charlotte’s doglike devotion to Arthur, and Mrs Guy’s lust for the pearls; similarly in ‘The Aspern Papers’ we have Julia’s guardianship of Aspern’s memory, Tita’s doglike devotion to Julia and then to the narrator, and the narrator’s lust for the papers. In the major novels, no leading character is defined by an obsession, all are thoroughly self-questioning, and the range of their responses to one another is very wide. The novels can never become focussed parables like the short stories, with a clear psychological point. In the novels the initial donnée is a theme that is developed in many unpredictable directions, whereas in the stories the donnée is the sum and substance of the story, worked out quickly with perfect logic. None of the stories could develop to novel length; The Sacred Fount is only an apparent exception; the narrowness of the protagonist’s obsession makes it more a short story than a novel, and it was originally conceived as a short story. Conversely, none of the novels could be reduced to short story length; confined to short story length the plots of The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl would be meaningless.

But the narrowness of focus of the short tales does not imply that they are superficial. Each of them probes a psychological situation, purified of accretions, and displays, ironically and dialectically, a pattern of motivation, behaviour, or relationships that could not be set out so economically and luminously on the broad canvas of a novel. The novels are surging oceans for strenuous swimmers; the tales are lucid pools in which on need only quietly gaze. Many of the tales are enigmatic, but not in the same way as the novels, where the final indeterminacy approximates to that of human life itself, rather than remaining merely an unsolved artificial puzzle. The characters in the tales are constructed in function of a thesis and remain circumscribed by the demands of its working out, whereas the novel protagonists are unpredictable from one chapter to the next and are allowed to grow and to have subtle reflections that undermine any simple account of what the novel is about.

Though I have followed up many hints and overtones in the story in my explication, the tale remains in the end remarkably free of divagation, for every part of it illustrates a central theme that I characterize as seduction. It is held together by the magnetism of the central Things, the jewels, or more precisely by that of the Thing among the things, the necklace. The two levels of seduction that emanate from these are filtered diversely in the reactions of the three characters. Arthur resists the seduction for reasons of respectability, found to be ‘paste’ in the end. Charlotte resists from moral uprightness. Mrs Guy surrenders to the seduction and becomes herself more seductive as a result. Her amorality might mean that she, too, is a fake, but since it is she who enables the pearls to have at last their due triumph, she seduces readers as the pearls themselves do. The story may lodge a small protest against the triumph of seduction, in the pang of sympathy it induces for Charlotte, but it seems basically to acknowledge the role of seduction in human affairs and to acquiesce with bemused admiration in the way of the world.

October 16, 2017

Impermanence is a fundamental theme of English poetry, which easily slips into the elegiac mode. Think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, of Keats’s Odes, of the Elegies of Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold. This was a mode in which Yeats was fully at home from the first, but especially in the 1919 collection, The Wild Swans at Coole:

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.(‘The Wild Swans at Coole’)

Coole was at the centre of Yeats’s brooding on impermanence, as his only foothold in the aristocratic culture of which he mourned the decline, as the birthplace of Lady Gregory’s son Robert, who died in 1918, and as surrounded by the cruelties of the Black and Tans and later of the Civil War.

Throes and threnodies of old age are darker in The Tower, 1928, which opens with‘Sailing to Byzantium,’‘The Tower,’ ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’ This last poem is perhaps Yeats’ most unqualified plunge into the abyss of impermanence.

Japanese tradition vehiculates two senses of impermanence, a feminine, poetic sense of transience (hakanasa) and a masculine, philosophical sense of impermanence (Buddhist mujô). Japanese philosopher Junzo Karaki writes: ’The gap between the tempo of this rapid fleetingness of the external world and the tempo of my psychology or emotion that does not readily go along with it is what constitutes the feeling of “transiency”’ (229). ‘When this “feeling” of feminine court art is transferred to the masculine feeling of the military world it becomes the “sense of impermanence,” from which stems the grief of impermanence’ (229), or we may say that there is a shift from the elegiac to the tragic. In contrast to stagnant court life, a time of war awakens tragic emotion that ‘borrows the Buddhist sense of impermanence as an underpinning’ (229). ‘The time of impermanence and change does not advance in a linear and continuous way…. The impermanence of arising-and-extinction, continually arising and continually passing away, is time in its naked form. Time is originally purposeless, discontinuous, instantaneous arising-and-extinction…. Impermanence is clearly shown to be such nothingness and meaninglessness. Impermanence is a cold fact, an actuality quite unrelated to emotions of wonder, poetic sentiment, and the like’ (231). One ‘strategy for conferring significance on time is so-called “creative achievement,” that is, culturalism or historicism… a way of artificially adorning the present. Humans, through believing in civilization and progress, are able to affirm time and life’ (232). Does Yeats unblinkingly face this meaninglessness of time, which is an obligatory gate for the Zen meditator?

For the softer side, Yeats could tune in to elegiac tradition, as in the opening lines of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’:

Many ingenious lovely things are gone

That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,

Protected from the circle of the moon

That pitches common things about.

But it is not only time or mortality that Yeats mourns for. Impermanence takes a far more upsetting form: the recurrance of irrational violence that shakes the very foundations of civilization and shows it to be a radically fragile construct:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep:a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.

Destruction rules, and the only refuge is retreat into ‘ghostly solitude,’ a Platonic retreat like ‘the half-read wisdom of daemonic images’ in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’:

He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned

Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant

From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,

Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent

On master-work of intellect or hand,

No honour leave its mighty monument,

Has but one comfort left:all triumph would

But break upon his ghostly solitude.

And this too is a kind of half-deceit, from which the poet turns into his most grief-laden elegiac lines:

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say?

These lines too are a kind of half-deceit, for they shift from the stern recognition of impermanence in all its traumatic cruelty to a softer semi-consolatory crooning over transience. For the sterner side of impermanence Yeats draws on ancient thought, especially on Platonism and, increasingly in later years, on Indian ideas of karma and rebirth. The second section of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ envisions impermanence as a whirlwind dance imaging the Platonic Year:

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound

A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,

It seemed that a dragon of air

Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round

Or hurried them off on its own furious path;

So the platonic Year

Whirls out new right and wrong,

Whirls in the old instead;

All men are dancers and their tread

Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

The impermanence undoes the consolatory topos of Tennyson’s: ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new,…’ ‘Ring out the thousand wars of old,/ Ring in the thousand years of peace….’ ‘Ring in the Christ that is to be.’ Yeats’s own esoteric philosophy of history did not stand him in good stead, as he admitted in a letter to Olivia Shakespear (quoted in Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence). Indeed, Yeats never let his philosophy become a barrier to experience, and perhaps in the end was deserted by it as much as by the ‘circus animals,’ and sent back to ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ (’The Circus Animals’ Desertion’). The spiritual adventure charted in ‘the book of Yeats’s poems’ (Hazard Adams) is vaster than the theories of A Vision.

Yeats’s dance to the music of time was always a circular one, threatening to be meaningless. Already in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (1889) we hear of ‘the many changing things/ In dreary dancing past us whirled,/ To the cracked tune that Chronos sings.’ ‘The Oriental gong owes something to Yeats’s engagement with Japan, and his “plays for dancers.” He knew that gongs were used in the Byzantine Church, and linked them with the bliss of Phase 15: “When gong and conch declare the hour to bless” (“The Statues”)’ (Sikka, 264). This cyclicism might have become a soft poetic conceit, but Yeats really struggled with history, attempted to face down its tragic bleakness, and built a remarkably capacious framework for handling its paradoxes(see Whitaker, Swan and Shadow).

Sometimes Yeats embraces impermanence—the radical unreliability of all things in time—with ‘tragic joy’ so that the sadness of transience is abolished as a weak and decadent attitude, and instead one is made stronger by taking the cruelty of impermanence, exhilaratingly, in one’s stride.

Some moralist or mythological poet

Compares the solitary soul to a swan;

I am satisfied with that,

Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,

Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,

An image of its state;

The wings half spread for flight,

The breast thrust out in pride

Whether to play, or to ride

Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

Here we are in Shelleyan elegy, but the last line strikes an apocalyptic note, for the ‘approaching night’ is not just individual death, but the night into which civilization is sinking. And Yeats can embrace apocalypse, make his own the destructive dynamic of the Platonic Year.

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:

That image can bring wildness, bring a rage

To end all things.

The opening poem of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” was inspired by Oedipus at Colonus, and later in The Tower we meet these lines from Sophocles’ play:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day.

Espousing the winds of destruction in a ballad of self-mocking mockery Yeats seems caught up in a dance of death that contrasts with the later more constructive tower poems, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1922-3) and ‘The Tower’ (1926).

Come let us mock at the great

That had such burdens on the mind

And toiled so hard and late

To leave some monument behind,

Nor thought of the levelling wind.

The final poem in the sequence make apocalptic destruction eerily seductive:

Violence upon the roads:violence of horses;

Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded

On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,

But wearied running round and round in their courses

All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:

Herodias' daughters have returned again.

As impermanence acquires the status of full-blown apocalypytic, Yeats draws on an Irish symbol: ’Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling wind, the winds that were called the dance of the daughter of Herodias in the Middle Ages’ (Yeats’s note to ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’). The wind is the dominant image of change and destruction in this poem, whereas it is the moon that dominates elsewhere (both images shared with Shelley). Yeats’s greatness as a poet is seen in the fact that of all 20th century poets he is the one who made the moon his own, so much so that we can hardly gaze at ‘The purity of the unclouded moon’ (‘Blood and the Moon’) without thinking of him.

The Winding Stair (1933) can be seen as a positive reply to The Tower on many points, notably in its more positive embrace of the world of becoming. ‘“Rereading The Tower,” he wrote Mrs. Shakespear shortly after it was published, “I was astonished by its bitterness, and long to live out of Ireland that I may find some new vintage.”’ “Already new poems are floating in my head, bird songs of an old man, joy in the passing moment, emotion without the bitterness of memory” (Unterecker, 170). Unterecker sees The Tower as masculine, The Wnding Stair as feminine (and the very titles suggest that opposition). The feminine kind of transience outweighs stern masculine impermanence in the latter collection:

But a raving autumn shears

Blossom from the summer’s wreath.

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but time. (‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’)

In this poem there is a moment of apocalpytic destruction but its somewhat playful atmosphere differs from the rage of The Tower:

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch…;

Bid me strike a match and blow.

In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ the masculine sword, ‘Unspotted by the centuries,’ is wrapped in a protective femining cloth:

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

From some court-lady’s dress and round

The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

Both are ‘emblems of the day’ now boldly reaffirmed in the spirit of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return of the same’:

I am content to live it all again

And yet again…

The moon in ‘Blood and the Moon’ triumphs serenely over centuries of violence:

but no stain

Can come upon the visage of the moon

When it has looked in glory from a cloud.

Coole now is celebrated for ‘A dance-like glory that those walls begot’ (‘Coole Park, 1929’), and the aging figure of Augusta Gregory is the centre of elegiac pathos.

They came like swallows and like swallows went,

And yet a woman’s powerful character

Could keep a swallow to its first intent;

And half a dozen in formation there,

That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

Found certainty upon the dreaming air,

The intellectual sweetness of those lines

That cut through time or cross it withershins.

Here we can say that beauty triumphs over destructive folly, perhaps the Pascalian triumph of the ‘thinking reed’ over all that conspires to crush it. The image of the swan, no longer desolate, carries the same message:

That stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;

And, like the soul, it sails into the night

And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;

And is so lovely that it sets to right

What knowledge or its lack had set awry. (‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931)

Transience itself is beautiful, poignant:

Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood.

‘Byzantium’ celebrates not the ‘artifice of eternity’ (of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’) but ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’ ‘Vacillation’ appeals to ‘such men as come/ Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb’ and declares: ‘Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.’